What Will Captain America 4 Make at the Box Office? (Update)

I previously suggested a range of $750 million-$1.2 billion as the likely gross for a fourth Captain America film entirely on the basis of the performance of prior Captain America and MCU films--if only as a starting point for thinking about the matter. However, we now have the first publicly available tracking-based estimates, which apparently project an opening weekend gross of $86-$95 million for the movie in the North American market (with the Friday-Sunday period in mind, the following Monday holiday not counted in).

Of course, a great deal can happen in the month between the publication of this estimate, and the movie's release (as the collapse of The Flash and the surging of Barbie both showed in the summer of 2023). Still, for the time being let us work with the numbers we have, and apply to them the combination of two multipliers--namely the multiplier we should use to extrapolate the full domestic run from the opening weekend, and the multiplier we should apply to the expected domestic run to get the likely worldwide take.

As it happens the MCU's movies tend to have fairly front-loaded grosses in North America. None has taken in there more than 3.6 times (or less than 1.8 times) its opening weekend gross. At the same time the movies do tend to be strong international performers, with the range here extending from a 55/45 split to a 31/69 split in the domestic/international gross, giving us another multiplier of between 1.8 and 3.2. Between the two we can broadly expect a Marvel movie to make globally between 3.3 times and 11.6 times its North American opening weekend gross. A fairly big range, if we go with the more typical 2-3 times its opener the movies usually make in their domestic run, and consider as precedents both Captain America 2 (given Captain America 3's exceptional nature as a Phase Three quasi-Avengers movie), and Black Panther 2 (given both its having to come after the gigantic preceding film and that it is the only movie where the persona was filled by a new character and actor), between which we get multipliers for the worldwide gross of 1.9 to 2.8, we end up with a narrower range of from 3.3-11.6 to 3.8-8.4. Safely assuming a middle-of-the-road performance with regard to the movie's domestic legs, and its international relative to its domestic response, we get a combined multiplier between 5.5 and 6.1. This works out to a gross of $325-$800 million for the global take at the outside, with the mid=range figure $470-$580 million--which, frankly, feels intuitively plausible to me. What we make of this as a performance may be another matter, however.