Robert Downey Jr will be returning to the MCU in next year’s ‘Doomsday’ (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)
Getty Images for Disney
The hurdle Disney faces in trying to attract audiences back to theaters to watch its upcoming Marvel superhero extravaganza Avengers: Doomsday has been revealed in data showing how high a bar it set with the movie’s predecessor.
Marvel dominated the box office for 11 years following the debut of the first Iron Man movie in 2008. It was revolutionary as it grounded its characters in reality and connected its storylines across a series of films known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Split into phases focusing on different villains, the movies culminated in a two-part titanic team-up starring an ensemble cast which read like a roll call for the Oscars.
Almost all of the biggest stars from the previous 20 movies played a part including the main team of heroes played by Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr. Their combined punching power pushed 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War to a $2 billion box office whilst its sequel, Avengers: Endgame did even better the following year. With takings of $2.8 billion it briefly became the highest-grossing movie in history until the re-release of sci-fi film Avatar took its crown two years later.
Endgame became a cultural phenomenon and made a natural conclusion to the series. It has been downhill since then.
‘Endgame’ was the biggest movie of all time on its release ©Marvel Studios 2019
Avengers Endgame
Instead of quitting whilst it was ahead, Marvel mined the depths of the comic book archives that its movies are based on. This led to pictures about increasingly obscure and cartoony characters which strayed far from the realistic origins of the series. It alienated many adults and the problem was compounded by the pandemic.
Disney commissioned a slew of superhero content for its streaming platform to satisfy the millions of people who were locked down indoors. However, just as the shows began to air, the Covid vaccine started to roll out enabling people to return to work. In turn, they had less time to watch streaming shows and had less money in their pockets due to the cash crunch caused by the pandemic.
Once followers missed one MCU movie it kickstarted a vicious circle as it made them more reluctant to watch the next one in case they didn’t understand it. In turn they thought the next would be even harder to follow and so on. Once they got out of the viewing habit it became harder to tempt them back.
Nevertheless, Disney wasn’t deterred and instead of bringing the curtain down on Marvel it began to skew it more towards a younger audience which hadn’t returned to work. It led to the movies having more fanciful plots, younger actors and there was even talk of a team-up film featuring child super heroes. That approach put off adults even more and didn’t have the desired magic touch on young audiences as they seem to be looking for more juvenile entertainment in theaters hence the wild popularity of films like Minecraft and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
The movie landscape has shifted in favor of more kid-oriented fare such as ‘Minecraft’
Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Seemingly aware that this strategy wasn’t bearing fruit, Disney tried to return Marvel to its adult roots with its two latest movies. Thunderbolts in May had the dark theme of depression whilst July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps was set in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s.
It appeared to be too little, too late as the movies each only grossed an average of $449 million. As the table in this report revealed, Fantastic Four’s haul was 58.7% down on the average made by the 11 phase three MCU movies leading up to Endgame. This is almost precisely in line with the prescient prediction made by expert industry pundit Valliant Renegade back in 2023 when he said that “Marvel has lost north of 60% of it’s audience since Endgame.” Despite this, Disney didn’t just continue motoring on with the Marvel juggernaut, it placed its biggest bet yet.
Entertainment industry gambles don’t come much greater than next year’s Avengers: Doomsday. Originally called Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, the plot of the movie had to be re-written when Jonathan Majors, who was due to play its antagonist, was found guilty of assaulting his former girlfriend.
Downey Jr himself stepped into the breach and, despite being killed off in Endgame, he decided to return to play the villainous Doctor Doom in the retitled Avengers: Doomsday. It instantly put the film on the map but also caused confusion with his former co-star Gwyneth Paltrow asking him on Instagram “I don’t get it, are you a baddie now?”
Hiring the Oscar-winner raised the cost of the movie and therefore the financial risk. It didn’t stop there as Disney also brought back the Infinity War and Endgame directing duo of Anthony and Joseph Russo, who are far from bargain basement choices.
In an attempt to recapture Endgame’s success, Doomsday features even more A Listers which is set to make it not just one of Marvel’s most expensive movies but one of the most expensive movies in history. As this report revealed, before the Russos and Downey Jr had even been announced, Disney had already spent a staggering $8 million (£6.3 million) on pre-production. If early indications are anything to go by, Marvel could have a real life battle on its hands to recoup the movie’s likely colossal costs.
The MCU has become famous for its stingers – scenes after the credits which set up the plot of the next instalment in the series. Doomsday is billed as being one of the most important instalments as it will bring an end to the current version of the MCU with Marvel Studios’ head honcho Kevin Feige recently telling Variety that a “reset” will debut in 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.
Given its significance, it’s perhaps no surprise that Doomsday has been set up in no less than three stingers. Two were at the end of the underperforming Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four whilst the third followed the credits of 2023’s The Marvels which had the lowest gross of any MCU movie with takings of just $206.1 million.
Recent MCU movies like ‘Thunderbolts’ have underperformed at the box office © 2024 MARVEL.
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
This raises the question of whether enough fans have watched the recent movies to want to see how Doomsday ties up the threads in them. The fervour about the film found on some fan websites suggests that it could indeed be as much of a cultural phenomenon as Endgame.
Until recently, precious little had been officially released about Doomsday despite it debuting in just over a year. During the summer a leak of concept art supposedly from the movie showed time travelling superheroes in a medieval setting which is unlikely to endear it to general movie-going adults if the leak proves to be accurate. However, children and die hard comic fans went gaga over the images. The same goes for the latest look which comes from a much more official source.
Last month at Disney’s Destination D23 bash, the studio kept fans on the edge of their seat with a teaser for Doomsday which didn’t show any footage despite filming being well underway in London. Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom was seen in The Fantastic Four’s post-credits scene but only from behind and key details of his costume were hidden by shadows.
However, earlier this week Marvel released a new official look at it in artwork and a hologram at the Walt Disney Studios Marketing Expo in Shanghai. The hologram shows a silhouette of Doom sitting on a throne and killing Endgame’s antagonist Thanos in a carbon copy of a famous frame from Marvel’s comics. The artwork shows decals on Doom’s suit which commemorate victories over several of the strongest Avengers including Thor and Captain Marvel.
It was all designed to demonstrate how Doom is the most serious threat the heroes have ever faced and it sent some fans into a frenzy. On reading some of the fan websites you could be forgiven for thinking that the MCU is as popular now as it was when Endgame was released. However, analysis of the bigger picture suggests otherwise.
Data from Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity of top search queries, shows that the worldwide level of interest in ‘Avengers’ now pales in comparison to in April 2019 when Endgame was released.
Google searches for ‘Avengers’ have plummeted after the release of ‘Endgame’ in 2019
Google Trends
Avengers reached peak popularity then with a score of 100 which represents the maximum relative interest worldwide rather than the absolute number of searches. In contrast, Avengers scored just 5 this month even though Doomsday is due to debut in just 15 months. The current score is also far off the second-highest peak of 55 in May 2018 when Infinity War was released and although Avengers had a score of 5 a year before that movie hit theaters, it didn’t dip below 12 during the year before Endgame’s premiere.
Such was the intensity of interest in the Avengers in the run up to Endgame that Captain Marvel, which was released in March 2019, grossed a staggering $1.1 billion even though audiences only gave it a rating of 45% according to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
As Valliant Renegade astutely noted, “Captain Marvel only made what it did in 2019 because it was given the lead-in to Endgame. Any film in that slot would have done $1B.” The takings of recent MCU movies suggest that those days are well and truly over.