'Fantastic Four' Box Office Crashes

Superhero films have lost their cultural relevance

Box office receipts show that the new Fantastic Four: First Steps is falling behind its competition. “This Monday haul falls short of DC Studios’ Superman, which grossed $12.9 million on its first Monday, July 14, 2025,” Marvin Montanaro reports. In fact, the film is now doing worse than the worst recent releases from Marvel.

More strikingly, it lags behind Marvel’s 2023 underperformer Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which pulled in $14.28 million on its first Monday. Even Captain America: Brave New World, considered a major commercial disappointment with an $88.8 million opening weekend, outperformed First Steps on its first Monday with $11.17 million.

Being a Marvel film, ticket sales for Fantastic Four are expected to drop about 60 percent during the second weekend. Only about 17 percent of cinemagoers were families, whereas PG-13 superhero movies normally see families making up 21 percent of the audience. Given the strongly pro-family message of the film was a conscious effort to win back this very demographic, that has got to be a bitter pill for Disney and Marvel.

And it still gets worse for superheroes, because both movies turn out to have a far higher break-even point than what was previously known. While film publicity has mentioned production costs of $200-225 million, Matt McGloin is reporting that “both James Gunn’s Superman and Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps have blown past their reported budgets, with each now costing over $350 million” (emphasis original). Extensive reshoots are to blame.

Hollywood regularly under-reports film budgets because large numbers tend to deter audiences, who have learned to see bloated productions as a red flag for bad movies. The revenue of each ticket is split with theaters, so $100 million in tickets sold equals just $50 million in actual revenue. Production budgets do not include the cost of publicity, which usually adds tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to the overall cost of a film, especially a blockbuster.

As a rule of thumb, any movie must more than double its own production budget (2.5x) in order to be profitable. If the real cost of Superman is $350 million, it must earn $875 million globally in order to make the first dime of profit. “Like Superman, if Fantastic Four really cost over $350 million, it would also need to make $875 million or more just to break even by industry standards,” McGloin says.

YouTuber ‘Culture Casino’, who has reported many details of both productions that were confirmed in McGloin’s reporting, had a few things to say about the various changes that were made in the course of the making of these two films and how the changes increased the costs of making them.

Creative ego is expensive. Gunn and Kevin Feige, head of Marvel, clearly made their movies more expensive through bad creative choices that the test audiences hated, and which had to be fixed. Yet both men were too full of themselves to fix everything that needed fixing. “We were told that Fiege got the message, and it seems like he got some of it. Not all of it.”

Superheroes have been overrepresented for too long. The global audience is exhausted with this uniquely-American genre, and so are Americans. After all, if Superman is no longer about truth, justice, and the American way, then why should the country that invented him care? Likewise, Disney Marvel became the enemy of good values and family entertainment, so no wonder families don’t go to their family-centric films. Too much damage was done in advance of 2025.

The superhero will now go the way of the cowboy. If there had not been a Marvel superhero film in the last five years to spoil the appetite of the audience, Fantastic Four might be heading toward a billion dollars in receipts, right now. To make superhero blockbusters that make money, start making fewer of them, and bring the auteurs to heel.