Once upon a time, about six years ago, superheroes were the biggest thing in cinemas. In 2019, no less than three superhero movies made over a billion dollars at the box office: Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Avengers: Endgame, which also happens to be the second highest-grossing movie of all time. If you throw Joker in there, it's four. Surely the good times would roll forever.
But they didn't. The sequel to Captain Marvel, The Marvels, came out a few years later and became Marvel's first box office bomb, grossing around $200 million on a budget of nearly $300 million. Major tentpole movies like Ant-Man 3 underperformed, earning less than both of its predecessors, and new heroes like Shang-Chi and the Eternals never caught fire. Things were even worse on the DC side of things. Whereas Aquaman made over $1 billion in 2018, the 2023 sequel made less than half that. It was the same story for the Shazam! franchise. And as with Marvel, new heroes like Blue Beetle failed to kickstart their own new franchises.
You might look at this and want to blame the pandemic, which had people staying away from theaters for awhile. But that explanation is incomplete, because there were still huge successes during this period, with movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness all making serious bank. It just feels like movie-goers got more choosey.
Before 2019, it seemed like every Marvel movie could count on turning a healthy profit. But afterwards, only some did. Parent company Disney put that down to giving folks too many things to watch, and for not exerting enough quality control over them. Take The Marvels; to fully appreciate that movie, you had to watch two different TV series on Disney+: WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. Is it any wonder a lot of people didn't feel like doing homework for a movie? Meanwhile, the DC Cinematic Universe had been shaky and without a strong direction ever since the underperformance of Justice League in 2017. Sensing things were on the downslope, viewers mostly stayed away, even for tentpole films like The Flash.
Whatever the reason, enthusiasm about superhero movies has died down over the past few years. Could 2025 be when it turns around?
Superman: First Steps
When Disney noticed that the Marvel machine wasn't putting in as much money as it used to, it made a plan of attack: release fewer movies further apart, and make sure they're all great. So far, that strategy seems to be working. The studio only put out one superhero movie in 2024: Deadpool & Wolverine, which made well over a billion dollars. The movie broke new ground by being the first R-rated movie in the MCU, it featured actors and characters everyone wanted to see, and you didn't have to watch a TV show to understand it. It harkened back to the 2010s, when the release of a new Marvel movie felt like an event, not a chore.
This year, we see if Deadpool & Wolverine is more than a fluke. So far, so good: Disney recently dropped a teaser trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which marks the first time this iconic superhero family has appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Within just a couple of days of release, it's amassed tens of millions of views:
Looking at this trailer, it feels like Disney has learned its lesson. The movie, directed by Matt Shakman, looks distinctive. Marvel movies have been dinged over the years for sticking too close to a bland house style, but First Steps breaks the mold with a fuzzy, faux-dated look; the aesthetic kind of recalls what Americans in the 1950s and 60s thought the distant future would look like. And First Steps is itself a period piece, another way it sets itself apart. And because it's set in the past, that means we won't have to watch any other modern Marvel movies or TV shows to know what's going on. But the movie isn't an origin story, an overdone template best avoided. Finally, First Steps stars buzzy actors like Pedro Pascal and Joseph Quinn, just in case the Fantastic Four themselves weren't enough to get fans in the door.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn't a reboot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it feels like a step in a new direction, which is getting people excited. Meanwhile, DC Studios actually is rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe, which began under the watch of Zack Snyder with 2013's Man of Steel before quietly dwindling out of existence. The new DC universe will begin the same way the last one did: with a Superman movie:
Superman is directed by James Gunn, the guy behind Marvel's (hugely successful) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Gunn will be DC's new Zack Snyder. But where Snyder is deadly serious, Gunn is chipper. Where Snyder likes washed out color schemes, Gunn prefers a bright palette. While Snyder's characters throw themselves into battle while growling edgy insults at one another, Gunn's strive to be understood while cracking jokes. Gunn has an altogether lighter approach to his movies, which may well be a better fit for a character like Superman, the good guy's good guy, the big blue boy scout, an unironically heroic hero in a genre increasingly dominated by subversion.
That's not to say Gunn doesn't have any edge to him, but his take on Superman will certainly be less dour than Snyder's. And so far, fans are responding very well; the buzz for Superman is positive, and that teaser trailer above has amassed over 50 million views since coming out in December. Like the Fantastic Four teaser, the Superman teaser gives us something different, namely a solid dose of whimsy: we can safely assume that Zack Snyder would never in a million years have thought to include Krypto the Superdog in his Superman movie. And if he did, that hound would be a rabid killing machine, not the cute little scene-stealer who drags a bloodied Superman to safety in the new movie.
Gunn's Superman stars Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and David Corenswet as Superman himself. It's not the buzziest cast imaginable, but when you're working with characters as big these, you can afford to let the acting do the talking. Together, these two movies are getting people genuinely excited about superhero films again, and the hype is only going to increase as we march towards the summer.
Double whammy
Superman will land in theaters on July 11, 2025. The Fantastic Four: First Steps will come out a couple weeks later on July 25. Studios have been trying to recapture the mania of Barbenheimer, when Barbie and Oppenheimer came out on the same day, ever since it happened in 2023. Both of those movies did spectacularly well, and while I don't think we can chock their success up to a clever portmanteau, releasing two highly anticipated movies close to each other does create an energy that fans feed off. You can compare them to each other, you can dress up, you can make jokes. It's part of what turns an ordinary movie into a theatrical event.
And remember: what doomed a lot of Marvel movies in the post-Endgame period was that they didn't feel like events; they felt like obligations only the most hardcore fans were willing to take on, because they were the ones invested in the longform story Marvel was telling slowly, movie by movie. Barbenheimer helped studios understand the value of turning their individual movies into Really Big Deals. Superman and First Steps may not be coming out on the same day, but coming out in the same month will generate some heat nonetheless.
Whither Captain America?
There are a couple Marvel movies coming out this year we haven't talked out. Captain America: Brave New World comes out on February 14, and if you ask me, it feels a bit too much like the Marvel of old.
Unlike First Steps, Brave New World doesn't have a particularly distinctive look, instead sticking pretty close to the Marvel house style. It also continues the Marvel tradition of cinema as homework: not only will Brave New World pick up after the events of Avengers: Endgame, where Steve Rogers, the previous Captain America, passed the shield onto Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie); but it will also follow the events of the Disney+ TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where Sam had a whole identity crisis about his new role, and feature the return of characters from 2008's The Incredible Hulk, which came out so long ago that the Hulk was played by Edward Norton instead of Mark Ruffalo. The barriers to entry are mounting...
On the other hand, Brave New World stars Harrison Ford as the president of the United States who turns into a huge red Hulk, so it's got something going for it. Still, the public at large seems less interested: while the teaser trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps racked up over 20 million views within a day of release, the one for Brave New World has amassed only 18 million views three months after release. Thunderbolts*, another Marvel movie coming out in 2025, has done similar numbers. Thunderbolts* features an ensemble cast of characters previously introduced in no less than four different Marvel movies and TV shows, so we're back on the cinema-as-homework model.
I'm sure both of these movies will have their fans and make some money (it helps that they were made on relatively modest budgets, at least compared to how expensive these films can get), but I don't see them exciting people as much as Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps do. They both feel like Marvel movies made under the old regime, before the suits decided to stop drowning us in content and focus on making fewer, but better, films. As it stands, Marvel has new movies coming out in February, May and July. That's starting to look like the overcrowded calendars of old.
I wonder if Marvel can fully pull itself away from that instinct. Even the title of the Fantastic Four movie is bit of a red flag: "First Steps" implies there are more steps ahead, getting us ready for sequels before we've seen frame one of the new film. If Marvel goes down that path again, I expect it will be met with more diminishing returns. But if Marvel, DC Studios, and anyone else who wants in on the game commits to taking their time, turning in excellent movies that stand on their own, and not flooding the market with so much content that we don't know where to turn, we could be embarking on a new golden age for the superhero movie.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.