What Will Captain America: Brave New World (aka Captain America 4) Make at the Box Office? (Preliminary Estimate)

It seems safe to say that the release of Captain America: Brave New World (aka Captain America 4) will be a crucial test of the continued viability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the superhero genre, and the blockbuster generally--which makes it well worth considering how the film is likely to do after hitting theaters this Valentine's Day weekend.

A reasonable place to begin such a consideration is the track record of the series to date. For this purpose I present the domestic, international and worldwide grosses for the series' three films below in both current dollars, and with the prices of the month of release adjusted for November 2024 prices (the latter figure presented in the parentheses).

Captain America--The First Avenger
Domestic: $177 million ($247 million) International: $194 million ($271 million) Worldwide: $371 million ($518 million)

Captain America--The Winter Soldier
Domestic: $260 million ($346 million) International: $455 million ($606 million) Worldwide: $714 million ($950 million)

Captain America--Civil War
Domestic: $408 million ($536 million) International: $745 million ($978 million) Worldwide: $1.153 billion ($1.514 billion)

Simply going by the average of the three films one would expect a Captain America movie to make a little under a billion dollars--while going by the precedent of the third film one would expect the movie to make considerably more than a billion dollars.

However, simply going by these figures ignores the reality that 2025 is a long way away from 2016--and that the grosses of the MCU's films have trended downward significantly since then in ways reflecting structural changes in the market for films. Most obviously there has been the (still ongoing) pandemic's effect on movie attendance. (Where before the pandemic North Americans were still buying 3-4 movie tickets per capita, in 2022-2024 the figure was closer to 2.) There has also been the blow dealt Hollywood by its diminished access to the Chinese market, which matters the more with the MCU because of how popular it was in that market. (The franchise cleared $1 billion in China in 2019 alone, with Avengers: Endgame alone taking in over $600 million, an extraordinary sum for any movie in any market, let alone an American release in one foreign market--and that's just not happening again anytime soon.)

All of this was evident in the way that the four MCU films that came out between July 2022 and May 2023 (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3) suffered drops in their real-terms, inflation-adjusted gross compared to their direct predecessors from Phase Three of about 20 to 50 percent. The bigger the prior movie had been, the bigger the drop tended to be (as seen in the difference between the third Guardians' 20 percent fall, and the drop of half suffered by the second Black Panther). Granted, the two follow-up films, The Marvels and Deadpool, did not perform this way--The Marvels seeing a catastrophic collapse in its gross of more like 85 percent compared to the successful original Captain Marvel, whereas Deadpool & Wolverine saw a great improvement in its gross, bettering the original Deadpool's take by about thirty percent (and in the process, producing the greatest hit, in real terms, in the whole history of the X-Men/Deadpool franchise). However, both those films were each in their way anomalous in their subject matter and the audience response to it (both of them ostentatiously postmodernist and more than-usually-comedic team-ups of characters from different parts of the Marvel franchise, if with the difference that Nia DaCosta's bringing together Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau simply was not the hit-maker that Shawn Levy's teaming up of Deadpool and Wolverine proved to be this past summer). By contrast Captain America 4, if perhaps more ambitious than many other recent MCU efforts, seems to be at bottom a "normal" superhero movie, such that it seems reasonable to rely on the Thor 4-Black Panther 2-Ant-Man 3-Guardians of the Galaxy 3 sequence as a relevant precedent. Given that Captain America 3 grossed $1.5 billion in today's terms, this implies a range of $750 million-$1.2 billion, with the fact that it was one of the franchise's biggest successes--precisely because its plot and casting made it a quasi-Avengers movie in the period of the franchise's peak of popularity--so that I would guess that the fall in Captain America's 4 gross would be closer to the bottom end of the range than the top on the basis of their very limited information. We will, of course, have a better basis for such a judgment when the tracking-based estimates start coming in.