Will 2025 be the death of Marvel?
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a tangle of sequels, prequels, phases, timelines, and reboots. It kicked off with 2008’s Iron Man and continues to lurch forward nearly two decades later with evermore characters, timelines, and movie stars, expanding like a plague. It is by far the most profitable franchise of all time, amassing over $31 billion as of January 2025.
There is a certain core group of cinema enthusiasts, including Martin Scorsese, who have never understood what all the hype is about. But even for those who will enthusiastically admit to being committed fans, 2025 is looking like it might spell the beginning of the end for Hollywood’s most bloated juggernaut. We are nearing the end of the so-called Phase Five of the MCU, which began with a dismal thud in 2023 with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and will conclude in May with Thunderbolts. There are plans all the way through 2027, plus five films in development for some time after that. The franchise isn’t going away, but it’s definitely losing its mojo.
It reached its financial peak in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, which earned nearly $2.8 billion at the box office. Given its title and resounding success, it could have been the perfect note to conclude the franchise. They could have gone out on a high. But the trouble with creating such a money-maker is that studio executives feel the need to milk it for every penny it’s worth. As a result, the MCU has expanded to include untold numbers of characters since then and, crucially, failed to justify it.
When there is a multiverse with infinite universes and timelines, no character is ever truly dead. Loki, Thanos, Killmonger, and Gamora have all gotten a get-out-of-the-underworld-free card in one way or another, while countless other characters have encountered and battled alternate versions of themselves in multiple dimensions. All of this leads to a question of stakes. When anything can be rebooted and prequelled, why should we care when a character dies?
The lack of stakes and the carpet bombing of MCU content has already watered down whatever power the franchise might have had for fans in the 2010s, but even beyond that, the most important issue is quality control, which brings us to Captain America: Brave New World. Released in mid-February, it’s the fourth instalment in the Captain America sub-franchise and stars Anthony Mackie as the latest red-white-and-true hero.
Part of the issue with the film was unfortunate timing. Its original title, Captain America: New World Order, had to be scrapped after a bruising election year when a person threatening to reorganise global alliances regained the presidency. The other problem was that the film clearly had quality issues. In a feature about the troubled production, Vulture interviewed an unnamed crew member who worked on the movie’s extensive reshoots. “I think everyone on the crew knew this is probably not going to be a good film,” they said, adding, “My co-workers who spent more time on Brave New World than I did said, ‘Yeah, this has been a really rough production.’”
So far, Brave New World has earned poor reviews and just barely managed to avoid becoming the MCU’s worst box office disaster, but not by much. It still hasn’t broken even, and it faced the third sharpest decline week-to-week in franchise history, with a 68% dropoff in ticket sales. Only the double whammy of 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels fared worse, losing 70% and 78% from opening weekend to their second week, respectively.
A one-off dud like Brave New World wouldn’t have been an issue several years ago, but in 2025, it’s the latest solidification of a growing pattern. It was one thing for the Ant-Man and Marvels movies to bomb. Neither Ant-Man nor Ms Marvel have been the most lucrative wings of the franchise. But Captain America has been, and its lacklustre showing will be setting off alarm bells for studio execs. Bright spots (meaning financial, not cinematic) like Deadpool & Wolverine are becoming the exception, not the rule, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon, given that Thunderbolts consists of all the MCU characters that even fans have probably forgotten about.
So, why does any of this matter if you’re more A24 than MCU? It matters because Marvel has had Hollywood in a chokehold for more than a decade, bleeding the coffers for mid-budget movies dry. If Marvel starts reliably losing money in the coming years, where will those studio dollars go? It’s overly optimistic to assume that they’ll all be poured into original IP, but it might signal a long-awaited shift in the industry towards movies that don’t cost upwards of $180m. Just when films like Anora and The Brutalist have forced Hollywood to take independent cinema seriously, Marvel’s potential collapse is coming at just the right time for the industry to face a more auspicious reckoning for once.
