What Will Avengers: Doomsday Make at the Box Office?

As those who have seen me play the game of "How much will this movie make?" before know, I prefer a quantitative approach based on the principal information actually made available to the public in a consistent, timely, systematic way--box office grosses. Thus I look at how the predecessors of a movie in a franchise (it is franchise films that lend themselves to this approach) did before, adjust the figures for inflation, look for any patterns I can find (the range of the grosses, the averages, the trends from film to film, etc.), and then turn to any factors that may skew the result--drawing analogy with how similar films did, for instance--while offering any necessary qualifiers. Thus did I calculate that if Indiana Jones 5 performed "like an Indiana Jones film" it could be expected to make a billion dollars, with a quarter of a billion dollar margin either way (with the caveat that given the downward trend the film seemed more likely to undershoot than overshoot the billion-dollar mark), while the possibility existed that, by way of analogy with Star Wars, it could play like Solo instead and crater--which is, of course, exactly what happened.

Thus when considering the prospects of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday I started with the four Avengers movies made to date grossed between $1.4 and $2.8 billion in current dollars, or about $2 billion and $3.7 billion in today's (August 2026) terms, while averaging some $2.6 to $2.7 billion in today's dollars. If we go by my rule of thumb that cutting out those films that did very poorly or exceptionally well (cutting out Captain Marvel and cutting out Spider-Man, cutting out The Thunderbolts and cutting out Deadpool) "normal" Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films make just 50-80 percent of what their predecessors did before the pandemic, with the biggest tending to take the largest hit, we end up with a range of $1 billion to $3 billion, and a modified average of $1.3 to $2.2 billion. The result is that going by the numbers I have here may reasonably expect the movie to make not less than a billion dollars, with considerably greater possible if not probable and twice that much within the bounds of reasonable expectation.

However, just as with Indiana Jones the qualifiers are really significant, because even allowing for the shock to the box office of the pandemic the latest Avengers will not have the advantages of its predecessors. It does not have the benefit of the kind of build-up that made the original 2012 The Avengers such a hit, and still less the far greater build-up that made the 2018 and 2019 Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame even bigger successes. Instead the best the movie will have going for it is the good will that this summer's Spider-Man has brought the franchise--though this may not count for very much in a period in which, in contrast with Phase Three's success in making the Marvel Cinematic Universe more than the sum of its parts, today the Universe is really just a collection of franchises of wildly varying popularity and appeal, all as much of the public may feel that they have already "seen their one superhero movie for this year." And especially as we are talking about the global gross one also ought not forget just how much China mattered in Endgame's mighty final take, that market alone contributing a mighty $632 million to the total ($827 million after adjustment for inflation), and just under $1 billion for Infinity War and Endgame together (some $1.3 billion in today's terms)--and that even if Hollywood is still capable of making big money in China (just look at how Zootopia 2 performed), China has not been anywhere near so reliable a field for Hollywood's films as it was in the '10s. (Deadpool & Wolverine, such a colossus in America, made just $60 million in China, while Spider-Man, if doing better, was still a long way from the event it was in America, or how the Avengers movies did in China back in 2018-2019, taking in just $232 million, and this about as good as it gets ordinarily, even $100 million a feat for an American movie in China these days.)

The result is that, speaking broadly, I expect that thinking in terms of its predecessors the movie is much less an Endgame box office prospects-wise than an Ultron, if that, for if a gross of a billion dollars or more is hardly inconceivable, it is also far from assured. (After all, if a billion dollars is not what it was before, you still have to sell a lot of tickets to bank that much.) And given what the last two Avengers films cost, and what this one project is already reported as costing (which British tax documents may, as has happened before with Marvel's productions and with Disney's productions more generally, prove a significant underestimate), even a billion dollar-plus gross may prove to be not just a disappointment for the studio, but actually put Disney-Marvel in danger of ending up in the red on this film, all while being worrisome indeed from the standpoint of the whole franchise. After all, there is much more than just the gamble on this one movie at stake, with Avengers 5 to be followed by Avengers 6 in the form of Avengers: Secret Wars, all as the franchise-runners are all too clearly looking to the two films to bring back the MCU's Phase Three glory days, with all that means for the bar the movie really needs to clear to be regarded by one and all as the unqualified, franchise viability-restoring success that its backers want it to be, and others to see it as. Indeed, given all that is riding on this one it seems to me that, however the film turns out, Christopher Nolan's New Hollywood-ish gamble on The Odyssey apart, Avengers: Doomsday seems to me the most interesting single film of the year from an "armchair movie executive" box office-watching standpoint.