Anthony Mackie Says Falcon and Winter Soldier Movie Would Have Bigger Box Office Than Tom Holland’s Spider-Man

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier star Anthony Mackie has thrown down the gauntlet on his Marvel Cinematic Universe co-star Tom Holland, and his Spider-Man franchise. In a new interview for Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Mackie mused that if the Disney+ series had been a traditional Marvel movie, it would have outgrossed Holland’s Spider-Man movies, which include Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s a timely boast: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Spider-Man: No Way Home are both dropping in 2021, which would be exactly the kind of Marvel Phase 4 showdown Anthony Mackie wants.

“There is competition within Marvel… There is competition,” Mackie told Sirius XM. “I just want to see somebody do an algorithm or figure out if we were in a movie theater how much money we would have made. Because I know it would’ve been more than Tom Holland as Spider-Man!”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has definitely generated buzz and viewership numbers worthy of a Marvel Studios project. We’ll never be able to truly compare box office to streaming value, but it is an interesting debate to consider. The closest comparison we have is no doubt the Captain America movie trilogy, with the latter two films both featuring Falcon and Winter Soldier as major characters. When you stack the Cap and Spidey films against each other, here’s how the money looks:

• Captain America: The First Avenger – $370.6M
• Spider-Man: Homecoming – $880.2M
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier – $714.4M
• Spider-Man: Far From Home – $1.13B
• Captain America: Civil War – $1.15B
• Spider-Man: No Way Home – ?????

As you can see, while the Spider-Man franchise has clearly been a bigger earner overall, the Captain America franchise has been steadily coming up on its left. It really would’ve been fun to see if The Falcon and The Winter Soldier could’ve finally leaped ahead of Spider-Man. Even if it didn’t, it’s still a big feat that more obscure characters like Falcon and Winter Soldier are now global icons on par with Spider-Man (Marvel’s biggest merchandising cash-cow for decades.

Sebastian Stan’s focus wasn’t on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s big box office battle with Spidey, but rather the battle for TV supremacy against Marvel fan-favorite Tom Hiddleston’s Loki series. As Stan points out, Hiddleston has already crushed it on TV:”If ‘The Night Manager’ [event series] is any indication, we are screwed or in a really great place.”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is streaming on Disney+.