Strong buzz from Marvel fans for “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” isn’t helping the film leg out well at the box office, as the Disney/Marvel Studios release has taken a sharp 66% second weekend drop from its $117.6 million opening to $40 million.
Overseas, the film is proving to be just as frontloaded, grossing just $39.6 million internationally for a two-weekend global total of $TK million. At this pace, “Fantastic Four” could join last year’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” as only the second film to open to more than $100 million and fail to cross $300 million domestic and $500 million worldwide.
It’s a hard blow to Disney and Marvel’s attempts to regrow widespread interest in the MCU beyond hardcore fans after years of inconsistently received films and streaming shows began to take their toll on the box office for films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “The Marvels” and “Thunderbolts*.”
With its lack of required viewing of previous MCU installments, strong critical and audience reception and a $100 million-plus domestic opening, it seemed like “Fantastic Four” had everything needed to leg out through the remainder of the summer. Instead, that all might be too little, too late for a substantial number of former MCU devotees who have fallen out of the habit of seeing every single title the franchise had to offer theatrically and don’t feel inclined to get back into that habit even when the buzz is strong.
Elsewhere, Universal/DreamWorks’ “The Bad Guys 2” and Paramount’s “The Naked Gun” are doing decently in their opening weekends. “Bad Guys 2” has opened to $22.2 million from 3,852 theaters, just a step below the $23.9 million of its spring 2022 predecessor. With two weekends of overseas play, the sequel has a running global total of $44.4 million against an $80 million budget.
“Bad Guys 2” will be looking for modest theatrical profit over the next few weeks, trying to match the $250 million global total of the first “Bad Guys” as it earned an A on CinemaScore and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 85% critics and 95% audience. If it did so, it would be enough to make it Hollywood’s highest grossing animated film of the year so far, topping the $145.5 million total of fellow DreamWorks title “Dog Man” back in January.
While Disney’s “Zootopia 2” is expected to be a huge moneymaker, American animated offerings this year like “Elio” have paled in comparison to remakes of animated classics like “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Lilo & Stitch,” the latter of which is the only American film so far this year to gross $1 billion.
The other billion-dollar grosser of 2025 is the Chinese megahit “Ne Zha 2,” which became the first animated film to cross $2 billion worldwide.
“The Naked Gun” is in third with a $17 million opening weekend from 3,344 theaters, hitting the top end of pre-release projections as it earns a $28.5 million global start. Akiva Schaeffer’s revival of the classic police spoof series earned an A- on CinemaScore, the same grade as the original 1988 “Naked Gun” starring Leslie Nielsen.
As expected for a revival of a Gen X comedy classic, “The Naked Gun” got half of its audience from moviegoers over 35. But the 25-34 demo still turned out rather well with a 27% audience share, giving hope that the film could get word-of-mouth from moviegoers who were too young to have seen Nielsen on the big screen. With a reported $42 million budget, that’s who the film will have to draw out for theatrical success.
“The Naked Gun” will likely be Paramount’s final film release under studio chief Brian Robbins, as its merger with Skydance is set to be completed on Thursday. Should he and film division chief Mike Ireland depart, they will leave having ushered Paramount to its first $1 billion-plus year at the U.S. box office since 2014, having done so in 2022 with a $1.3 billion total led by “Top Gun: Maverick” with support from films like “Scream 5,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” and “The Lost City.”
Warner Bros./DC’s “Superman” is in fourth with $13.9 million in its fourth weekend, bringing its total to $316 million domestic and $551 million worldwide. Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” completes the top 5 with $8.4 million in its fifth weekend and totals of $317 million domestic and $766 million worldwide.
More to come…
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