When Deadpool and Wolverine grossed over a billion dollars last year, Marvel was lining up to make what may be two of the most expensive movies of all time, with a rumored budget of a billion or more for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, based on figures like 150 million already spent with Robert Downey Jr. and another 100 million plus with Agbo and the Rousseaus to direct. We’re a quarter of the way there already. No one had even rolled film yet. Still, there was a huge article in Variety that broke in the last 48 hours.
basically calling out the black and white of Marvel Studios’ ledger and saying, “This is the end of the line.” Thunderbolts was officially that nail in the coffin, and now Marvel is not going to drop boatloads of cash because that billion-dollar number is no longer in play. And it’s very obvious there is a new strategy. Thunderbolts was supposed to be the start of that. It got off to a disaster.
And this is the outcome. We’re going to talk about what’s in the Variety article, what it says about Marvel Studios’ future spending, and what this means for the future of the superhero genre when it’s not an Avengers title or something akin to a big crossover. But first, if you could grab the subscribe button. Thanks to everyone who’s been subscribing and helped grow the channel again at a breakneck pace lately. And if you haven’t already, I would just kindly invite you to do so. It’s the number one thing you can do to support us as content creators. Plus, it’ll enter you for the giveaways if you want. Stick around to the end of the video. We get into all the giveaway stuff again there.
Okay, so this article just broke in Variety under the headline, “Thunderbolts Lost Millions of Dollars Despite Great Reviews; Where Does Marvel Go Next?” They’re pretty heavy in the calculus here, but I’m going to boil it down to a couple of key numbers. They point-blank say in this article, “The math is this.” Thunderbolts would have needed to make $425 million at the box office.
in order to break even. That’s with a reduced budget, quote unquote, a reduced budget of $180 million to make the film and another $100 million to market it. Keep in mind, while that’s $280 million total, Marvel movies generally cost about $200 to $250 million to make before the marketing budget. That said, the Thunderbolts only grossed $371 million at the box office, meaning Marvel lost somewhere in the neighborhood.
of over $50 million. And that’s for a Marvel movie that was both critically and fan-acclaimed and was actually good. Now again, we’re not going to just read through this article, but it points out some of the obvious: that there are obviously huge franchises like Avengers, Spider-Man, and X-Men that they are going to greenlight and continue to make because those have been money makers since before the MCU and will hopefully continue to be money makers for Marvel.
But where they used to be, hey, we’re going to release Guardians of the Galaxy. Hey, we’re going to do a She-Hulk TV show. They’re not doing that anymore. Forget it, that is never getting greenlit again. That’s why Nova got canceled in the first place. That’s why they just said that they’re not going to do TV shows for major marquee characters, and they’re only going to do street-level shows on Disney Plus at that. They’re not going to spend huge budgets on these shows because people stopped watching because the content got so bad. And there will be those who look at all of that stuff
who point to the fact that only six of the last 13 Marvel films have even reached the half-billion number mark and a lot of them have lost money when it’s all said and done and say, “This is the end of Marvel; this is the end of Marvel Studios; it’s all over.” And it is such a joke because the truth is that those box office numbers are only one small part of the Disney and Marvel brand that actually makes so much more money off of the merchandise and product licenses; it’s not even close. Just for an example.
Merchandise alone, surrounding some of these films, in some cases is estimated to make twice as much as the box office. And that doesn’t count the fact that Marvel has actually been extremely ubiquitous with their licensing. Basically anyone can get Marvel licensing; you just have to pay Disney and Marvel their cut. They make so much money off the Marvel brand in direct-to-consumer sales and licensing that even if the movies made no money and were, quote unquote, a failure,
in service of the Marvel characters’ brand in Zeitgeist, that they would still keep making these movies and TV shows regardless. Those who want to point to this as the end of Marvel clearly don’t understand that Marvel characters and their brand have been cool and around with people for about 50 years and that’s not going away anytime soon. And none of this, none of this has even mentioned another core part of the whole Disney business model, which is their theme parks.
Which we know, based on what Robert Downey Jr. said about the future and what he’s seen for Marvel, it enthused him to want to play Doctor Doom and come back. Countless hundreds of millions spent on that for billions, billions with the B in return from their theme parks. So there are so many prongs to the Marvel IP over at Disney and what it means for Marvel in terms of total business that Marvel Studios in the films, even though they’re suffering right now to some extent,
because of how much bad content they put out.
The Marvel IP still makes so much money for Disney. It is still overwhelmingly profitable, with Marvel Studios being one small sliver of that pie. And again, when you have a film like Deadpool and Wolverine that is profitable with a billion dollars, it can offset a lot of $50 million losses for the other six films that, again, didn’t reach the half-billion-dollar mark. While it looks like doom and gloom to those who want to see it there, yeah, the entire movie industry is contracting right now. And I’m not a Marvel Apollo.
Because those of you who are familiar with me know I love to call out Marvel when I have a chance, and when I’m not feeling something, I say it. I think it’s just very clear that Marvel made a lot of bad content, and it turned a lot of fans off. But the truth is that die-hard Marvel fans have been fans of Marvel and will continue to be fans of these characters inside and outside of the movies for decades to come. And it was that core fan base that propped up Marvel movies and got them ahead of all of the rest of the film industry in the first place.
Those fans are still going to be there. I’m certainly one of them. And if I had to guess, a lot of you watching my channel are too. Here we are. We were here before. We’re still going to be here. Fair-weather fans are going to come and go. And again, there will be a lot of people and channels. And it’s totally cool. We want to point to this and say, “This is the end.” The superhero genre is over. Marvel movies are over.
But in my opinion, that’s just an extremely myopic view of one small thing that’s going on again when the entire film industry is contracting because there are so many offerings of different types of content now. Of course, the most expensive content, which is Avengers movies, is going to suffer. That being said, Marvel will continue when what it actually means for their future is that when they make a Blade movie, fingers crossed, a Midnight Suns film,
Hercules or any of these other films that we’re hearing are rumored to have budgets that are going to be closer to a hundred and a hundred and fifty million instead of 250 million are still some of the most expensive movies made in the industry, just not as expensive. They’re going to cut corners on spending where they can, but listen, that doesn’t mean we can’t get great films. A hundred and fifty million dollars is still a ton of money. Dune: The first one was made on a budget of a hundred and sixty-five.
So look, a loss is a loss. Thunderbolts losing 50 million, Ant-Man losing about 50 million—you can’t cut that any other way. But there are still major wins with Deadpool and Wolverine that offset that, and it’s the Deadpool and Wolverines, the Avengers, and the Spider-Mans that they’re going to continue to make. But you guys, let me know all your thoughts down below. As always, I’m very curious as to what you guys think about this. And yes, we may end up back in a world where it’s mostly the main marquee characters, the A-tier publishing characters, that find their way into making it into movies and TV shows, but
That’s also probably for the best, and that’s where they can feature side characters. Let’s face it, we all would have been fine if She-Hulk had shown up in a couple of other people’s projects, and we really didn’t need Secret Invasion. Nobody needed Secret Invasion. Marvel certainly didn’t need Secret Invasion.
