Over its opening weekend in theaters, The Fantastic Four: First Steps followed in Lex Luthor’s footsteps. That is to say, the $200 million Marvel reboot failed to defeat Superman — at the box office. The fourth movie iteration of The Fantastic Four earned $118 million in its opening three days: $7 million less than DC Studios’ Man of Steel reboot grossed over its North American debut earlier this month.
Industry observers had closely been watching the weekend tallies as not only a box-office battle royale between two competing superhero titles released within two weeks of each other from rival studios — Fantastic Four from Disney’s Marvel studio division, Superman from Warner Bros.’ DC Studios — but as a bellwether of theatrical moviegoing’s overall health. Judging from both films’ nine-figure hauls, though, the prognosis is good. “To have these back-to-back $100 million-plus openings for these two superhero movies is just good for the superhero genre in general,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst for Comscore. “I think DC and Marvel are actually bolstering one another. This definitely puts to bed the whole idea of superhero fatigue.”
The retro-futuristic, Matt Shakman–directed F4 overindexed most pre-release “tracking” estimates to deliver Marvel’s biggest opening of the year (Captain America: Brave New World debuted to $88.5 million domestically and Thunderbolts* to $76 million; neither is on track to turn a profit). Positive word-of-mouth buzz certainly helped. Starring Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the eponymous quartet and Julia Garner (as the mysteriously iridescent Shalla-Bal, a.k.a. the Silver Surfer), the family-forward sci-fi thriller notched an A- Cinemascore and currently ranks at 87 percent “Fresh” on the Tomatometer. Also scoring the second-biggest opening day of 2025 behind Chicken Jockey juggernaut A Minecraft Movie, Fantastic Four pulled in another $100 million internationally — placing it in a virtual dead heat with Superman, which took in $220 million over its global opening.
As box-office analyst David A. Gross notes in his FranchiseRE newsletter, since COVID times, only a select group of spandex-clad superhumans — Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Deadpool, and Wolverine — has managed to crossover into blockbuster territory. The cinematic adventures of a phalanx of other, perhaps not-ready-for-prime-time heroes — Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Marvels, and Kraven the Hunter — fizzled ignominiously enough to become Hollywood cautionary tales, each respectively furthering the industry narrative that audiences had become fatigued with caped crusaders. “This is an outstanding opening,” Gross said of F4. “During the last five years, superheroes have stumbled outside the most established and successful series.”
It’s easy enough to overlook, then, that none of the previous Fantastic Fours kept turnstiles humming at the multiplex. Leaving aside 1994’s low-budget, Roger Corman–produced, never-released The Fantastic Four (a slapdash production cobbled together to allow Constantin Film to hold on to distribution rights), 20th Century Fox’s 2005 Fantastic Four features Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, and a pre-MCU Chris Evans in the blue super-suits, mugging and grunting their way through a “bland,” “wildly uneven” origin story. Grossing a respectable $333.5 million worldwide ($548.2 million adjusted for inflation), however, that F4 established a movie fandom for Marvel’s oldest hero team and spawned a quickie sequel also featuring a certain shredder intergalactic alien, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. But thanks to even worse reviews and middling returns on the second movie’s higher budget versus its box-office take — $130 million to produce, $301 million globally — FF: RotSS effectively put the franchise on ice for the next eight years. The 2015 iteration (another The-less Fantastic Four, but alternately referred to as Fant4stic) stands as one of the most legendarily troubled productions in recent Hollywood history. Directed by Josh Trank, who reportedly almost got in a fistfight with co-star Miles Teller, micromanaged actors’ breathing during scenes, and lost control after delivering a disastrous director’s cut, the movie was torched by critics and slunk from theaters after grossing a mere $56 million in North America.
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“This is a set of superheroes that are very well known but have had a hard time breaking out at the box office,” says Daniel Loria, editorial director of Boxoffice Pro. “In terms of IP and IP power, yes, everyone knows Fantastic Four. Yes, it’s blue-chip IP in the comic-book world. But it was unproven in the feature-film world.”
Last summer, Deadpool & Wolverine debuted to a massive $211.4 million domestically on the way to becoming the top-grossing R-rated film of all time. And as the most reliable blockbuster factory in Hollywood history, it wasn’t so long ago that even Marvel’s less well-received titles — Thor: Love and Thunder, Eternals, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — could expect to cruise to more than $100 million in North American box office over their opening weekends. But since the N-95 era, when Marvel pivoted its cinematic-universe operation to include shows streaming on Disney+ — requiring viewing of things like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki to stay current with the MCU metanarrative — Marvel’s faithful began tuning out en masse. At a recent press event on the Disney lot in Burbank, however, Kevin Feige, Marvel’s chief creative officer and president of Marvel Studios, reassured reporters that studio brass understands the vote of no confidence implicit in declining ticket sales and complaints of MCU overload. He made a kind of solemn oath to course correct with Fantastic Four: First Steps. “It is a no-homework-required movie,” Feige said. “It literally is not connected to anything we’ve made before.”
And yet. A post-titles credit in First Steps promises the Fantastic Four will next be seen in December 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday. Which means FF: FS is, in fact, homework for that megabudget, villainous Robert Downey Jr.–costarring superhero extravaganza. “As goes superheroes, so goes the box office,” Dergarabedian says. “For theater owners, if this genre fell out of favor as some predicted it would do or was doing, that would leave a huge void in revenues for exhibitors, for studios. The theaters — they want this category to kick ass. Right now, it is.”
