After the disappointing performance of “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel Studios has one last chance at a box office win this year with “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Fortunately for Disney, the outlook is as sunny as many of the scenes in the MCU’s latest film.
All tracking points to a $100 million-plus opening for “Fantastic Four,” with independent trackers on Tuesday projecting $110 million. But that was before critics came in with reviews that, like “Thunderbolts*,” were not effusive but widely leaned positive. “First Steps” has an 87% Rotten Tomatoes score with particular praise given to the film’s colorful, retro-futurist production design.
Exhibitors tell TheWrap that presales for “Fantastic Four” have picked up dramatically since Monday, and that they expect the film will not only beat projections, but could meet or exceed the $125 million opening weekend of Warner Bros./DC Studios’ “Superman” earlier this month. If it does, it will become the third highest opening of the year behind only “A Minecraft Movie” ($162.7 million) and “Lilo & Stitch” ($146 million).
Even if those more enthusiastic predictions don’t come true, “Fantastic Four” is set to blow past the $74.3 million opening of “Thunderbolts*” and the $88 million start of “Captain America: Brave New World.” The film’s vibrant aesthetic and its casting of the popular Pedro Pascal as Mister Fantastic have played major factors in that.
But the biggest difference between “Fantastic Four” and its two most recent predecessors is that it is a homework-free Marvel film. That is to say it isn’t connected to past MCU titles, with no major characters or plot threads previously introduced like in “Thunderbolts*,” which features an ensemble cast of characters from Disney+ shows like “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and films like “Black Widow.”
This is by design. In a press conference with trade reporters last week, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said he and his team made the decision early on to introduce the Fantastic Four in an alternate universe from the one that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is set in.
“We didn’t want the issue people had with ‘Eternals’ where they asked, ‘Where were these guys before? Why didn’t they help fight Thanos?” he said.
Feige also spoke on Marvel’s recent plans to scale back its production after the blitz of streaming series released on Disney+, noting that they had released too much for all but the most hardcore of fans to keep up with.
“It’s that expansion that I think led people to say, ‘Do I have to see all of this? It used to be fun, but do I have to know everything to get this?’” he said. “I think ‘The Marvels’ got hit the hardest, where people were like, ‘I recognize [Captain Marvel] from a billion-dollar movie, but who are those other two? I think they were in some TV show?’”
As “Fantastic Four” enters theaters, “Superman” continues to hold extremely well in the U.S., crossing $250 million domestic on Tuesday. Along with its strong cast and upbeat tone, a big part of that film’s word-of-mouth has been its self-contained nature, using an opening crawl to get moviegoers up to speed on the history of superheroes in the new DC cinematic universe and Superman’s place in it before dropping them right into the action.
Since fan goodwill and box office grosses for Marvel started to curdle in 2023 with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the studio still has found some hit releases. But those hits have been “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which was focused on being a trilogy finale rather than setting up future plot threads, and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” an R-rated film celebrating the IP Marvel Studios inherited from Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.
Conversely, films like “Thunderbolts*” and “The Marvels,” which involved the expanded MCU mythos on Disney+, have either underperformed or outright flopped. It’s a problem Marvel faces as it builds up to next year’s “Avengers: Doomsday” without the years-worth of hype and story development that led to the combined $4.85 billion global grosses of “Infinity War” and “Endgame” in 2018 and 2019.
But aside from a mid-credits sequence, “Fantastic Four” doesn’t put direct focus on what is to come, even if fans know that its heroes will be fighting Doctor Doom when Christmas 2026 rolls around. It just focuses on being a fun summer blockbuster that is accessible to anyone.
With films like the kid-friendly “Bad Guys 2” and the gruesome horror film “Weapons” on the slate ahead, there will be no four-quadrant competition aside from “Superman.” So “Fantastic Four” will have nothing keeping it from trying to get lapsed moviegoers to give Marvel another chance on its own merits.