The Fantastic Four: First Steps hasn’t quite set the box alight in the way Marvel might’ve hoped, but there are much bigger things to come. The first Fantastic Four movie in the MCU had a pretty good opening weekend, with $117 million domestic and a worldwide haul of $216m. It suffered a sharp drop in its second domestic weekend, which set alarm bells ringing that it’d already flamed out, though such panic is a little unwarranted. The movie may not represent a return to the MCU’s heyday, and is perhaps representative of a new normal for Marvel Studios.
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Overall, The Fantastic Four: First Steps‘ box office stands at $434m and, against a reported budget of $200m, it should end its run as a modest success for Marvel. That’d be a slight improvement on the previous MCU movie, Thunderbolts* ($382m), albeit not one that screams Marvel is back. We were so used to seeing MCU movies easily make $600m, and several reach $1 billion or higher, that anything below still feels like a surprise. But while First Steps‘ performance is in line with where the franchise has been recently, it’s about to soar much higher once again.
The Only MCU Movies With Release Dates Are All Big Hitters
After its post-Avengers: Endgame period of expansion backfired, Disney is cutting back a little on its MCU releases. Though three released in 2025, there are currently only that many Marvel movies with release dates across 2026 and 2027 combined. That will undoubtedly change, of course, and we’ll likely see them stick with at least two movies per year, but it does mean that right now the upcoming movies are among Marvel’s heaviest hitters:
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day – July 31, 2026
- Avengers: Doomsday – December 18, 2026
- Avengers: Secret Wars – December 17, 2027
Heading into Spider-Man 4, the Tom Holland-led franchise is on a major winning streak. Spider-Man: Far From Home made just over $1 billion at the box office, before No Way Home, buoyed by appearances from Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, swung to a massive $1.9bn. Brand New Day probably won’t reach that, as it’ll be a more street-level movie rather than a nostalgia-driven multiversal event, but the MCU Spidey brand is so strong that it will be expected to clear $1bn.
Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars should be even more guaranteed successes. The lowest-grossing of the four Avengers movies so far is Age of Ultron, which made $1.4bn, a relative disappointment given the expectation was it’d surpass the first installment ($1.5bn). The franchise went to a whole other level entirely with Avengers: Infinity War, which became the first MCU movie to break the $2bn barrier, and then levelled up again with Avengers: Endgame, which grossed $2.7bn and briefly took Avatar‘s title of the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Simply put, Avengers movies have an average $1.9 billion at the box office. MCU Spider-Man movies have an average $1.3bn. The cinematic universe has had its struggles, and it’d be unwise to expect either to match their immediate predecessors, but with prime release dates, plenty of hype, and in the case of Doomsday (and likely Secret Wars) an absurd amount of star power, these should all be making over $1 billion, and the Avengers movies much, much more than that.
Spider-Man & The Avengers Won’t Prove If Marvel Is Back
The upside for Marvel is that, between these three movies, it should easily be looking at upwards of $4 billion at the box office. The downside is that if they are the successes we expect, it won’t reveal a great deal about the state of the MCU. It’ll be the non-sequels that reveal the truth about interest in Marvel, and whether Spidey and the Avengers have done enough to revive it more broadly.
Again, it’s currently unknown which movies will happen or when, but things that we know are in development include an X-Men reboot, Armor Wars, Blade, and a mystery movie being produced by Scarlett Johansson. Of course, step one is actually getting those done, given Blade was first announced back in 2019 and still doesn’t have a finished script, but if they happen, they’ll all be box office tests. The X-Men should be a home run, in theory, but it’ll depend on how Marvel chooses to introduce them. Their introduction will likely have a lot of hype, even if the brand was tarnished at the end of the Fox era.
The others are bigger challenges. Will people turn up for Armor Wars, rather than viewing it as Iron Man Lite? Blade could probably have a lower budget (and likely an R-rating), setting different expectations for success. The Wesley Snipes movies performed well, but made $418m combined (unadjusted for inflation; adjusted, it’s roughly above $800m). It’d be unfair to expect the reboot to be a monster smash, but perhaps that’s the kind of thing the MCU needs more of, rather than everything having budgets of over $200m and needing to make $500m+ at the box office.
Ultimately, the MCU is – and will continue to be – fine. There are plenty of other sequels it can make that’ll be big hitters, such as Black Panther 3. Fantastic Four 2 (assuming it happens) should perform better after the characters have been in Avengers movies, and thus exposed to a wider audience. But whether Marvel returns to the kind of dominant force where gambles like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man pay off big style is another matter entirely, and it’ll take a few years to get that answer.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is currently playing in theaters.
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