‘Superhero fatigue’ sets in as Marvel flounders at box office

Marvel’s latest superhero film has suffered a box-office collapse, raising fears that cinema audiences have grown tired of a genre that has dominated Hollywood for more than a decade.

The Marvels is on track to record the lowest opening weekend for MCU films. Picture: Marvel Studios

Marvel’s latest superhero film has suffered a box-office collapse, raising fears that cinema audiences have grown tired of a genre that has dominated Hollywood for more than a decade.

The Marvels, a female-led movie starring Brie Larson, made only dollars 47 million over its opening weekend in North America, displacing The Incredible Hulk as the Marvel Cinematic Universe production with the lowest opening revenue. The Incredible Hulk, part of the same franchise, opened in 2008 with takings of dollars 55.4 million, but that was before the American media group had become Hollywood’s dominant box-office force. The 33 Marvel films have made almost dollars 30 billion.

The poor performance of The Marvels, which made dollars 110 million in total in its worldwide opening, has raised the prospect of “superhero fatigue” and of audiences no longer being as enamoured with the genre as they once were. The film is a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, which made dollars 153 million over its opening weekend in North America on its way to a worldwide total of more than dollars 1.1 billion.

“This opening is an unprecedented Marvel box-office collapse,” David A Gross, of Franchise Entertainment Research, a film consultancy, said. He added that second episodes in superhero series usually returned stronger and on average delivered a 12 per cent improvement on the original. The Marvels, however, had opened 67 per cent below Captain Marvel, he said.

“The strikes hurt the film’s marketing, but that’s not what’s driving these numbers,” he said, referring to the actors’ and screenwriters’ strikes – now resolved – that had prevented Larson and her co-stars from promoting it.

“Since the pandemic, superhero films have endured simultaneous streaming, creative experiments, management upheaval at DC Comics, unimaginative and bad movies, saturation on TV and the deterioration of the Chinese market for all American films. Over the last three and a half years, the growth of the genre has stopped.”

Natalie Portman as Mighty Thor and Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Marvel Studios' THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER. Picture: Jasin Boland, ©Marvel Studios 2022

Marvel is launching three original storylines over the next 18 months, comprising the Spider-Man spin-offs Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter, as well as Thunderbolts, a story about a group of antiheroes that is due in July 2025. “Those three pictures will determine whether the genre has traction left or is in a long-term, sustained decline,” Gross said.

Michael Niederman, a professor in cinema and television arts at Columbia College Chicago, said that Marvel had overstretched itself by producing too much content for film and television. If the superhero genre had peaked, it was difficult to predict what would take its place, he said, adding that “if the genre does not refresh itself with original stories and characters, then it’s in decline”.