Sony Pictures billed “Venom: The Last Dance” as the final chapter in Tom Hardy’s alien-symbiote-buddy-comedy franchise. But with its $51 million domestic opening weekend — 44% and 55% lower than the previous two installments — the movie also signifies the continued twilight of superhero cinema as the dominant force at the box office.
Superhero movies used to be an indispensable revenue driver for the film industry. In 2018 and 2019, the average global gross for superhero fare was more than $1 billion. This year, it’s half that, even with the record-breaking success of “Deadpool & Wolverine.” In fact, the Ryan Reynolds-Hugh Jackman vehicle is the only comic book movie that could qualify as a hit since “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” debuted in June 2023. Since then, the genre has suffered an extraordinary box office drought. Film after film, from “The Flash” to “The Marvels” to “Madame Web,” opened to, at best, a shrug — and, at worst, outright rejection: “Joker: Folie à Deux” is on track to earn the ignominious distinction of making less in its entire box office run than its predecessor’s $248.4 million global opening weekend in 2019.
Between 2015 and 2019, 25 out of 30 superhero titles — 83% — took in more $500 million worldwide, some considerably so. After the pandemic, that dynamic has been flipped on its head: Since 2022, 10 of 17 superhero titles — 59% — have made less than $500 million globally, some considerably so.
The reasons for the drop in box office performance vary from film to film: DC’s output was hampered by scandal and the knowledge that the franchise was rebooting under new leadership; Marvel had oversaturated the market with its Disney+ shows and was already in the process of dialing back; Sony was trying to build a universe of live-action Spider-Man characters without Spider-Man. The overall impact, however, has been an unmistakable depreciation of the genre’s commercial might.
These stiff financial headwinds place an almost existential pressure on the 2025 superhero slate to deliver. After opening just “Deadpool & Wolverine” in 2024, Marvel Studios is ramping back up to three films: “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Thunderbolts*” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”
“There are no slam dunks here,” says Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “There’s still a lot of goodwill for Marvel. It’s still the biggest show in town. But to think that these are going to do ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ business — I just don’t see that for any of these films.” A significant factor facing “Captain America 4” and “Thunderbolts*” is how much they rely on characters and plotlines from several earlier MCU titles, including Disney+ shows “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and “Hawkeye,” and feature films “Black Widow,” “Eternals,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Captain America: Civil War” and even 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk.” That interconnectivity had been an advantage for Marvel Studios from its inception, but was seen as a hindrance for recent projects like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Secret Invasion” and “The Marvels.”
“The Fantastic Four,” by contrast, is set in an alternate timeline, allowing the film to mark a fresh way forward that insiders say has energized the studio. Its characters could scarcely be more important to the Marvel comics universe — they’re called Marvel’s First Family for a reason — but two separate attempts at 20th Century Fox in the 2000s and 2010s to make them into marquee stars never caught fire. Marvel Studios can’t afford for that to happen again: Robert Downey Jr. is already set to return as the team’s archnemesis, Doctor Doom, for 2026’s “Avengers: Doomsday,” and that film and 2027’s “Avengers: Secret Wars” will be directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, who helmed the last two “Avengers” movies to global grosses sailing past $2 billion. Marvel, in other words, has set for itself a formidably high bar for the reintroduction of these essential characters, and now it has to clear it.
“‘Fantastic Four’ has to perform better than ‘Captain America’ and ‘Thunderbolts*,’ because they want to ramp up into a couple ‘Avengers’ films back-to-back,” Bock says.
Marvel Studios is also committed to co-producing Sony Pictures’ fourth “Spider-Man” movie with Tom Holland, which Destin Daniel Cretton (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) will direct. Sony Animation is also in production on the third and final “Spider-Verse” movie, and the studio’s TV division is making “Spider-Noir” with Nicolas Cage for Amazon. But the future of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe films — made without Holland or Marvel Studios — is in limbo. Although “Venom: The Last Dance” does end with a post-credits tease, there currently are no other SSU projects on the studio’s slate following the December release of the R-rated “Kraven the Hunter” with Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
“Sony’s Spider-Man universe hasn’t fully imploded yet, but ‘Venom’ is now feeling the gravity of the superhero spinoff squeeze,” Bock says. “This isn’t a great look for the studio, which, at one time, had fantasies of several Spider-Man titles each year. There’s no doubt Sony needs to go back to the drawing board.”
The superhero stakes in 2025 are highest, however, for DC Studios. In January 2023, newly installed co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran announced a brand-new slate of 10 movies and TV shows that would relaunch the universe as a fully integrated creative endeavor. The first of those projects, the animated series “Creature Commandos,” debuts on Max in December, but the new DC Universe takes flight in earnest with the release of “Superman,” written and directed by Gunn.
“I don’t think you can stress enough how important ‘Superman’ is for the entire DC Universe,” Bock says. “This probably has to open with $100 million [domestically], something DC hasn’t been able to pull off in quite a long time” — aside from 2022’s “The Batman,” which, like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” was produced outside the DCU. “Warner Bros. and DC films are really going to be at a turning point if ‘Superman’ does not succeed. They will have to make some big decisions.”
Gunn and Safran’s pledge that no DC project will move forward without a finished script also helps to mitigate risk for the company should “Superman” falter: Only two of their previously announced projects — the feature film “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” and the streaming series “Lanterns” — have entered production, along with the animated feature “Dynamic Duo.” Projects featuring less prominent characters like Booster Gold, Swamp Thing and the Authority remain without a greenlight for now.
Still, Warner Bros. and Disney remain steadfastly committed to their respective DC and Marvel slates well into this decade — and that doesn’t look like it will change any time soon. “There still isn’t anything to replace superheroes at the box office in terms of films with the potential to make that amount of money,” Bock says. “Until we see some other genre take over, they’re going to continue to invest in it.”
From Variety US