Remember when superhero movies printing money felt like a law of physics? A time when even the most obscure comic book property could seemingly stumble its way to a billion dollars? Those days are over, and 2025 has made that brutally clear.
For the first time in over a decade, not a single superhero film cracked the global box office top five. Despite releases featuring crown jewels from both Marvel and DC—Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Captain America: Brave New World, and Thunderbolts—none managed to surpass even $700 million worldwide. James Gunn’s Superman finished at $615.8 million globally, while The Fantastic Four: First Steps earned $521.8 million. To put that in perspective, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel made $670.1 million back in 2013—and that’s without adjusting for inflation.
What’s happening here goes deeper than just “bad movie fatigue.” The superhero genre isn’t dying—it’s fundamentally changing, and the industry hasn’t fully grasped what that means yet.
The Momentum Has Left the Building
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: superhero movies became a cultural phenomenon in 2019, not just a successful genre. Half of the 16 superhero films that ever crossed a billion dollars were released in that golden window between 2018 and 2019. Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Aquaman, Joker—they weren’t just movies, they were events that transcended the typical comic book fanbase.
My aunt, who once mocked my Spider-Man posters, rushed to see Endgame opening weekend. That’s the kind of mainstream penetration we’re talking about. The genre had achieved Super Bowl status—pulling in hardcore fans, casual viewers, and everyone in between.
Avengers: Endgame spent $200 million on marketing alone, turning the film into an unavoidable cultural moment. But here’s the thing: you can’t sustain Super Bowl-level hype year-round. Marvel took two of its biggest players—Iron Man and Captain America—off the board. The last Avengers film literally had “end” in the title. A lot of people saw that as their exit ramp, and they took it.
Now audiences only show up when there’s heavy nostalgia or fan service involved. Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine both crossed a billion by giving fans exactly what they’d been clamoring for—multiverse cameos and the return of beloved characters. But original stories with new faces? That’s a much harder sell these days.
Marvel’s Content Overload Has Become Homework
Let’s talk about Phase Four, where things went completely off the rails. The formula used to be manageable—Phase 1 gave us just five films over four years, all building toward The Avengers. Phase 2 kept things steady. Even Phase 3, with its 11 films in three years, worked because everything had a clear destination: Thanos and the Infinity Stones.
Then Phase Four hit, and suddenly fans were expected to consume seven films plus eight Disney+ series in roughly the same timeframe. The MCU isn’t a collection of standalone movies anymore—it’s become a sprawling, interconnected universe where missing even one Disney+ show means you’re lost when the next film drops. What used to feel like an exciting shared universe now feels like assigned reading before a test.
And here’s what really stings: some characters just…disappeared. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came out in 2021, and four years later, there’s still no sequel. That’s a massive gap for what was supposed to be one of Marvel’s next-generation heroes. After Eternals bombed, Marvel seemingly pretended it never happened—despite introducing a giant Celestial emerging from Earth’s ocean, an event that should have rocked every subsequent MCU project.
The multiverse saga itself has felt increasingly directionless, especially after Marvel’s original roadmap collapsed. Kang was supposed to be the next Thanos-level threat, but after Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania disappointed at the box office and Jonathan Majors faced legal troubles, Marvel pivoted hard. They scrapped Kang entirely, which retroactively made huge chunks of their storytelling feel pointless.
The multiverse concept itself undercuts dramatic stakes. If a character dies, another version can always show up. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine got one of the most definitive sendoffs in superhero history with Logan, yet there he was again in Deadpool & Wolverine. And now, with Kang abandoned, Marvel’s desperately bringing back Robert Downey Jr.—not as Iron Man, but as Doctor Doom. Without the long-term buildup that made Infinity War and Endgame feel inevitable, there’s little momentum heading into the next Avengers films.
Even the post-credits scenes have become empty promises. Remember when Michael Mando’s Mac Gargan confronted Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, setting up Scorpion? That was 2017. Eight years later, he still hasn’t appeared. Harry Styles as Eros? Forgotten. These teases that once felt thrilling now come across as gimmicks Marvel never intended to pay off.
DC’s Reboot Carousel Is Exhausting Audiences
While Marvel drowns in content, DC keeps hitting the reset button—and audiences are tired of the whiplash. There used to be breathing room between reboots. We had time to miss these characters. Christopher Reeve’s Superman to Brandon Routh. Michael Keaton’s Batman to Christian Bale. Those gaps mattered.
Today? Henry Cavill’s Superman only just wrapped a cameo in Black Adam before being recast, with David Corenswet now wearing the cape. Batman has been rebooted three times in 15 years—Christian Bale to Ben Affleck to Robert Pattinson—and James Gunn is planning to cast yet another Batman for his shared DC Universe. We’ve had four different actors play the Joker in the last 15 years.
The constant churn creates apathy instead of anticipation. When audiences are bombarded with new versions of the same icons over and over, the sense of event disappears.
DC has also splintered into multiple continuities running simultaneously. Alongside Gunn’s new DCU, The Batman exists in its own standalone universe—at least for now. For casual moviegoers, it’s confusing. Too many Batmans and Supermans dilute the brand entirely.
And then there’s the franchise fatigue around certain properties. The Fantastic Four: First Steps was the fourth attempt to bring Marvel’s First Family to screens. The 2015 version was a disaster, and even the enjoyable 2000s films with Chris Evans and Jessica Alba didn’t leave a lasting cultural impact comparable to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man or Fox’s X-Men. The 2015 reboot made only $167 million globally—basically cementing the FF as box office poison in many viewers’ minds. No amount of retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetics can fully overcome that baggage, no matter how good the new film actually is.
The Streaming Factor Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
Here’s a truth that makes studios squirm: streaming has fundamentally changed theatrical economics for superhero movies. During the pandemic, Disney and Warner Bros. conditioned audiences to watch new releases at home simultaneously with theatrical runs. You didn’t need to leave your couch for Wonder Woman 1984 or Black Widow—no parking fees, no overpriced concessions, no guy kicking your seat.
That wrecked the box office for multiple films and created a lasting behavioral shift. Now, even when studios abandon day-and-date releases, they rush films to digital and streaming faster than ever. Superman hit digital just over a month after its theatrical release and arrived on HBO Max about two months later. Not long ago, you’d wait nearly a year to watch a blockbuster at home in good quality.
Why rush to theaters when you can watch it at home in eight weeks? The only films that truly demand immediate viewing are the “spoilable” ones—Spider-Man: No Way Home was packed because everyone knew social media would ruin the surprises. But excellent films like Superman, The Batman, and Across the Spider-Verse didn’t have that urgency factor. Lots of people just waited.
Would these films have hit a billion if streaming didn’t exist as it does now? We’ll never know. But the billion-dollar benchmark increasingly feels like a relic from a different era.
The Homework Problem Gets Worse
Let’s circle back to something that killed Thunderbolts and Captain America: Brave New World at the box office: mandatory homework. Captain America: Brave New World made $415 million worldwide—barely half of Captain America: Civil War‘s billion-dollar run. Part of the problem? The film featured a new Captain America who became Cap in a Disney+ series many casual viewers never watched.
If you didn’t see The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you missed Sam Wilson’s entire character arc and the reason he’s holding the shield instead of Bucky. You also wouldn’t understand why Valentina Allegra de Fontaine matters, or recognize several other characters. The film expected audiences to have done their streaming homework just to understand the basic setup.
Thunderbolts fared even worse at $382 million, despite being the best-reviewed superhero film of 2025. Here’s a movie starring characters most general audiences didn’t even remember. Ghost from Ant-Man and the Wasp? Yelena from Black Widow? US Agent from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Taskmaster from Black Widow? These are deep cuts that required homework across multiple projects, most of which underperformed or went straight to streaming.
Compare that to the Guardians of the Galaxy, who debuted as a team in their first film. You didn’t need to watch anything beforehand. Everything you needed to know was right there on screen.
What Audiences Actually Want
Here’s what’s getting lost in all this: audiences are showing they crave cinema again. Films that make them feel something, that challenge them, that say something meaningful about the world we live in. Martin Scorsese caught heat for saying superhero movies aren’t cinema, but 2023’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved his point. When given the choice, audiences showed up in droves for films combining spectacle with genuine substance.
More recently, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners offered audiences a sharp, haunting exploration of cultural appropriation and racial exploitation using vampires as allegory. That kind of layered storytelling—the kind that stays with you long after the credits roll—is what people are hungry for.
Even within superhero films, the best-received moments aren’t the CGI-heavy action sequences anymore. The most praised scene in Superman was a tense conversation between Lois and Clark—a moment James Gunn admitted was a risk to include, even though it’s exactly what audiences wanted. People don’t just want explosions and quips. They want stories that resonate and reflect the times we’re living in.
Younger audiences who grew up on Marvel and DC are increasingly flocking to horror films and original event movies that feel fresher and more daring. Even Kevin Feige has acknowledged Marvel needs to slow down—a rare admission that the once-infallible formula has run out of steam.
The Natural Life Cycle of Hollywood
Maybe this isn’t a crisis. Maybe it’s just the natural evolution of cinema. Genres have always risen and fallen with the times. The Western dominated Hollywood for decades before becoming a niche curiosity. The 1970s belonged to downbeat dramas reflecting a disillusioned America, while the ’90s gave us over-the-top action spectacles. Every era gets its signature, but none lasts forever.
For over a decade, superhero films were Hollywood’s safest bet—practically printing money with every release. But that era appears to be ending. The question now isn’t whether the genre will survive (it will), but whether it can evolve into something audiences still care about in the way they once did.
The billion-dollar benchmark may be gone for all but the most event-driven superhero films. And you know what? That might actually be healthy. When every superhero movie was expected to gross a billion, studios took fewer creative risks. They played it safe, following formulas and banking on brand recognition.
Now, with lower expectations and smaller budgets becoming necessary, maybe we’ll get more focused stories. More character-driven narratives. More films willing to take chances because they don’t need to appeal to literally everyone on the planet just to break even.
The age of the superhero blockbuster dominating global cinema might be over. What comes next could be something even more interesting—if studios are willing to adapt to this new reality instead of chasing the ghost of 2019.