‘The Marvels’ Is Officially the Lowest-Grossing MCU Movie Ever After Box Office Run Ends

Expectations for ‘The Marvels’ weren’t high in terms of box office numbers like they are for some other MCU projects. However, no one probably thought things would be this bad.

First, the opening weekend was somewhat weak. Then, the first week was even weaker. And now, as ‘The Marvels’ ends its box office run, it officially became MCU’s lowest-grossing movie of all time.

The movie ran in theaters for a full month and tallied $80 million in domestic box office returns and just under $197 million worldwide. It is not even enough to cover the approximate $220 million net budget, which is not something the MCU is accustomed to.

Although the movie will remain in theaters throughout the holiday season, Disney shared a note to the press on Sunday stating that they’ll ‘stop weekend reporting of international/global grosses on this title’ as they do not expect the holiday season to give too big of a boost.

They expect to break even in the movie in the end, but nothing more than that. Just the past weekend, ‘The Marvels’ fell to the 11th place in overall box office numbers with only $2.4 million.

It was to be expected that ‘The Marvels’ would become the lowest-grossing MCU film to date, especially after opening to $46 million domestically – the lowest opening in MCU history. Then, the next weekend saw almost an 80% drop from that number, which was yet another MCU negative record.

It’s the first MCU film ever that failed to hit $100 million domestically, and even though ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ had weaker reviews overall, it still tallied almost half a billion at the box office.

One can’t even blame audience fatigue for the superhero genre. After all, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ just recently garnered almost $850 million. In the end, it seems that the film simply wasn’t marketed well.

And, when you hear explanations from Disney’s CEO Bob Iger about why the movie flopped, you see that even they are aware of the quality of MCU projects over the past year or so. In a recent interview, Iger said:

“‘The Marvels’ was shot during COVID. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day. 

We got to the point where if a film didn’t do a billion dollars in global box office, we were disappointed. That’s an unbelievably high standard, and I think we have to get more realistic.”

Basically, he admitted that he thinks the movie wasn’t supervised well enough, which is why it is sub-standard. I’d disagree, though, because I found ‘The Marvels’ to be more exciting than the last Ant-Man film, and it wasn’t even close.

Be that as it may, things are looking grim for the MCU right now – especially after hearing that the next MCU movie in line – ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ – had such bad test screenings that it is headed for extensive reshoots.

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