Has the Ceiling Fallen for Superhero Films?

2025 was supposed to be a year of recovery for Hollywood generally, and the superhero film genre particularly, with Marvel seizing on the undeniable smash that Deadpool & Wolverine was at the box office in the summer of 2024 with a new Captain America, a New Avengers, and a daring reimagining of the Fantastic Four (third time's the charm!), while Warner Bros. was launching its reboot of the DC universe with Superman.

Of course, there were those who were skeptical about the bullish press--as I was about the year generally, the superhero film more specifically, and particularly the claqueurs' insistence that the Deadpool movie was proof that "Marvel's back!" But as the fact that you have come across this view not in the Penske Press but on a blog of the type very much an endangered species in the Internet's Maximum Era, no one of real weight in Hollywood or the claqueurs who dutifully represent their views to the world at large cared to air such an opinion in public. Of course, as usual these days the Establishment view proved wrong, the view of the dissenters right, as all four superhero movies disappointed. Even with prices in 2025 about 25 percent higher than in 2019 according to a Consumer Price Index that almost certainly underestimates it the movies made between $382 million and $617 million, and took in less than $1.94 billion altogether. Putting it in 2019 terms the biggest success didn't quite make the half billion dollar mark, while the average take was more like $400 million, versus the billion-plus bucks that were commonplace at the time.

There is no way to spin that as a success by comparison with the grosses superhero films so regularly scored not just in Marvel's Phase Three glory days, but the "real" grosses of such films through the twenty-first century as you recall when you look at the consistent successes of Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, as well as the X-Men, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Aquaman series' at their strongest commercially, and for that matter, the colossal financial investment of the studios in all of these films that makes a lot more sense when that billion-dollar gross is a possibility. But that was how things went during the year--even with most of these films frankly being well-received by critics, and those moviegoers who bothered to show up, so, no, the lame "There's no superhero movie fatigue, just bad superhero movie fatigue" line won't fly, while the admitted backlashes against both Captain America 4 and Superman probably ought not be overrated as factors in this decline. (We've seen worse before, not always to much effect.) This is all the more the case in that it is all too consistent with what I have been saying over and over and over again, namely that the long-eroding box office has shrunken structurally and sharply post-pandemic, that if you want people to show up to your movie they really have to be excited for it, and that large more casual audience tentpoles used to be able to draw in with some regularity just cannot be counted upon anymore.

"But what about Deadpool?" the doubter may splutter. Again I insist that Deadpool did so well in 2024 not as a "four quadrant" tentpole for everybody but as a movie playing to a very enthusiastic, if also very large, cult and giving those fans what they want rather than trying to be a broader crowd-pleaser. In the absence of Deadpool-like devotion the ceiling would seem to have definitely fallen for the superhero film, with (I know full well it's a small data set, but it broadly aligns with my calculations about an overall market just 60 percent the size of the 2015-2019 average) $600 million about as good as it gets. Should American superhero films get their old opportunity in the China market (and that doesn't seem out of the question post-Zootopia 2) they might do better than that by supplementing their earnings elsewhere with more money from this market. Still, the game has changed, with this reaffirmed by the fact that it isn't just superhero films but big action movies of all types that are suffering, as we see with Avatar 3's take down significantly from that of the prior film in the series (which itself had a gross way down from that of the original), and the troubles of the spy-fi genre as seen in the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible movies (and it seems fair to say, the slowness with which the next Bond movie is coming along). And so rather than tentpoles the studios would do better to target smaller movies at smaller audiences and, by racking up lots of relatively large profits keep their businesses in business--a practice which does not necessarily rule out superhero movies, of course, even big-budget ones (it worked with Deadpool!), but makes the strategy that has prevailed for so long an ever-bigger money-loser likely to just put more red ink on books that already have so much of them that Hollywood as a whole can seem to be going the way of Enron.