A 13-Year MCU Streak Has Officially Ended & It’s Disney’s Fault

by

As a huge Marvel fan, 2025 feels like a turning point for the MCU. It was a massive year, especially because a long run of success continued! It all started with the incredible performance of Deadpool & Wolverine – easily exceeding $1 billion at the box office. And that momentum carried right into what are practically guaranteed billion-dollar hits with Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. Marvel Studios really delivered with those three big releases this year.

2025 started with Captain America: Brave New World, then saw the releases of Thunderbolts at the beginning of summer and The Fantastic Four: First Steps mid-year. However, none of these superhero films were major box office successes, earning $415 million, $382 million, and $521 million respectively.

This year, several movies outperformed Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, including DC’s Superman. This signals a potential end to the MCU’s long-standing box office success – since 2012, at least one MCU movie had consistently ranked among the year’s top 10 highest-grossing films. However, with more recent releases proving more popular, that impressive run has ended, and Disney is the reason for this change.

Zootopia 2 Knocked The MCU Completely Out Of 2025’s Top 10 Box Office

With Zootopia 2‘s success, The Fantastic Four: First Steps has dropped out of the top 10 highest-grossing movies of 2025 globally. It was the last film from that year still holding a spot, but it was expected to eventually be overtaken.

Disney’s new animated film was released last week, just in time for Thanksgiving. After nine years of waiting, fans eagerly went to see it in theaters worldwide. The film, Zootopia 2, had a record-breaking opening weekend, earning an impressive $560.3 million globally.

The film earned an incredible amount of money in just five days, already exceeding the total box office revenue of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This success has caused the Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby movie to drop to number eleven in worldwide box office rankings.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s recent struggles are likely to persist throughout the rest of the year. The movie Wicked: For Good is on track to surpass First Steps and become the twelfth highest-grossing film, needing just $130 million more to do so – an amount it’s expected to earn quickly.

With the upcoming release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, the highest-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film this year could fall to number thirteen. If Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 does well, it’s even possible the movie sequel could earn more than all three MCU films planned for 2025.

Even if Fantastic Four does well, 2025 will be only the second year the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t had a film rank among the top 10 highest-grossing movies worldwide (not counting 2009 and 2020, when Marvel didn’t release any films).

Fortunately, the studio won’t likely see its biggest blockbuster perform as poorly as Thor did in 2011, when it reached only 15th place – a record low for a top-grossing film.

With exciting new movies like Avengers: Doomsday and Spider-Man: Brand New Day on the horizon, Marvel Studios has a chance to regain its momentum. However, 2024’s box office results clearly show that audiences aren’t as enthusiastic about Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films as they once were. If they were, at least one of the year’s releases would have joined the list of top 10 highest-grossing films.

Read More

2025-12-02 23:18