Are Superhero Movies Dying?

Once a colossus that stalked across theatre screens and earned billions upon billions of dollars in box office, the American superhero movie has now reached a point where years of failed big-budget offerings and being pecked at by maligning critics who call them "junk," or even "not movies at all" (so has said Martin Scorsese*) the genre is now running into a hard wall of growing indifference.

The Feb 13 release of Captain America #4 ("Captain America Brave New World") appears to be already drawing down on the numbers of tickets it can sell after only two weekends of release. With a drop off in demand of nearly 70% after 11 days of release, these numbers show the film tracking even lower than many other "failed" superhero films that have come out since 2023. That was the year it was first clearly seen the first faltering steps of the genre without the obscuring excuse of "pandemic effect." The bad box office performance of Ant-Man #3 ("Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania") which stalled with earnings shocked quite a few people, although there was an eventual claimed profit of $80,000 on the venture. The problem that "positive" number poised was that the community of earnings-watchers who check on mainstream Hollywood releases, few of them actually believe that positive $80K to be true.

Using various mathematical formulas to detail how much money is kept by theater owners, how much is spent above production budget to market a film across the internet, TV and media in general, it appears that "at best" a film production company might get 50% of ticket money, which means if your film cost $388 million to make and $100 million to market (i.e., Ant-Man #3 costs), you've got to get above $966 million in ticket sales and secondary fees (like streaming or renting) to start generating profit, something that Ant-Man #3 didn't do with its recorded box office of only $476 million.

This is a simplified formula, and more powerful production companies can insist upon more advantageous deals with theater operators, but in the end a superhero film usually has expensive amounts of CGI effects so the ability to make money is hampered right from the start with a higher threshold than other kinds of movies. This calculation helps explain why so many of these films are intended to reach blockbuster status as part of the raison d'etre for being made. With the crashing numbers for Captain America Brave New World it appears that rationale for future superhero films in general is disappearing, and in the wake of those numbers coming forth over the second weekend of release, other production companies (for example DC-Warners) has already announced a dramatic curtailing of their own superhero film and TV product scheduled for the future, likely a reaction to seeing how poor the prospects are for the genre.

But superhero cinematic fare has cycled through highs and then lows before, with the first big burst of high-earning films that came about from Superman in 1978, then after a number of sequels a lull arrived, only to be reactivated with the blockbuster performance of the Tim Burton Batman film in 1989 which spawned a whole new slew of superhero films that expanded the genre. What is different this time around is that the relatively recent success of the Marvel universe films (some 35 titles) and Chris Nolan Batman movies, among a others, has created an earnings standard that is tough to achieve. As stated before, the CGI-costs for this kind of film can be huge, and then there's the studio formula of attaching expensive "big name" stars to these productions as a kind of guarantee to tap into a fan base that isn't just the superhero genre.

But this doesn't really identify the main issue, the "superhero fatigue" that gets brought up when these big-budget films flame-out: audiences like superhero films, but only certain kinds of them, and apparently too much meddling with the story formula will not be tolerated, not to mention another obvious thing: poor craftsmanship in story-telling. The recent Captain America Brave New World was supposedly shot "2.5" times as the original movie tested badly with in-house audiences, and the repair work eventually amounted to shooting the film twice-or-more over. A lousy movie, even a superhero one, will turn away audiences, something that may confuse some Hollywood film-makers who view the potential customer as a sucker who can be fooled with the right number of explosions, fights, and most of all, a hurricane of CGI effects. But film critics, who are derided as out of touch and an inclusive group of snobs, are not wrong when they've been pounding out a repeating drumbeat criticizing the parade of badly constructed stories in so many recent super-films.

Is Captain America Brave New World the nadir of this problem? There are a few more superhero films in the pipeline that are coming out no matter what over 2025-2026 because they're either finished or already well into production, but if they're garbled messes and contain the non-superhero things that audiences have been turning their nose up at, this doomed trendline will probably continue until Hollywood simply won't fund any more of them.

* In an October 2019 interview with Empire magazine, Scorsese stated: "I don't see them. I tried, you know? But that's not cinema." He said these films are like theme parks, lacking emotional and psychological depth associated with traditional cinema.

Original page Feb 25, 2025