While Fantastic Four: First Steps opened quite strongly in its first weekend, $117 million domestically, with a total around $257 million worldwide so far, things are taking a turn for the worse.
While Fantastic Four will still take its second weekend, the movie only grossed $11.7 million on Friday, which is down a massive 80% from the previous Friday during its launch weekend. That puts it on pace to fall short of estimates and it may not even break $40 million in its follow-up weekend.
It’s difficult to spin this. For comparison’s sake, in the same month, Superman dropped 53% from its first weekend to its second. And while Fantastic Four may outpace other recent, rather poor MCU offerings by a bit, this is far from a roaring “we’re back” warcry, despite these big names and how much they will tie into the upcoming pair of Avengers movies.
It’s not quite clear what happened here. The film reviewed well among critics, an 86%, and really well among fans, a 92% with 10,000 scores in, one of Marvel’s highest. But as we’ve seen that…doesn’t quite matter. Thunderbolts, the previous MCU film, was almost an identically-reviewed hit, 88% and 93%, but it was a self-admitted miss by Marvel, and one of its lowest grossers. As a result, Fantastic Four may also be trending toward the bottom tier of overall earners in the MCU.
It’s a little surprising. You can make excuses for a lot of past MCU failures:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was just awful
- The Marvels focused on two characters from TV shows fans may have missed
- Black Widow got hit by COVID
- Eternals had a bunch of heroes no one knew
- Thunderbolts had a bunch of not-really-heroes that not enough people knew (or cared about)
- Captain America: Brave New World was a mantle-pass and weird Hulk sequel
Fantastic Four? It’s unclear. These are big, big names in Marvel. The cast was great. The movie was liked by critics and fans. Is it just…fatigue? Was Superman a factor? Everyone who cared saw it opening weekend and word-of-mouth didn’t matter?
Marvel is not down and out. They have just this week started ramping up hype for 2026’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, announcing cast members and roles and a first look at Tom Holland’s new Spidey suit. No Way Home made almost $2 billion. This movie will not fail. But Fantastic Four? This is looking rather rough now.
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