The Superhero Future
With Disney taking a serious gut-punch at the box office over Snow White, getting talk going on a new Avengers movie featuring the old, money-making cast, is an obvious (and prudent) PR move.
March 27, 2025
They're bringing the Avengers back together but no Tom Holland? – Newsweek
With Disney taking a serious gut-punch at the box office over Snow White, getting talk going on a new Avengers movie featuring the old, money-making cast, looks like a helpful way to revive hope for future box office potential.
Cast announced Avengers Doomsday : Chris Hemsworth, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Wyatt Russell, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, Kelsey Grammer, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Joseph Quinn, David Harbour, Winston Duke, Hannah John-Kamen, Tom Hiddleston, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal, and Robert Downey Jr.
More coverage of Doomsday cast at Variety
"This will rejuvenate the MCU" – The Direct
The issue at hand at Disney is multifold, and it is a miniature version of what's facing the entire superhero-entertainment industry complex, which is: superhero movies are consistently failing at the box office ("superhero fatigue" is a term that's been used many times in the past ... remember how it was used to explain the Green Lantern movie that bombed in 2011 starring Ryan Reynolds?), and as much as last year's Deadpool/Wolverine did really well ($1,338,071,348 billion worldwide) it was not a film really "made" by Disney, Warners, Marvel or Sony, but controlled by Ryan Reynolds who seems to know what fans expected and delivered it.
This cannot be said any longer about the machinery running Disney/Marvel, and from Ant-Man Quantumania, The Flash and on down to the latest gnarled up messes Snow White and Captain America 4, the sheer lack of Hollywood-level storytelling craftsmanship is glaringly missing from the "product," and on top of that is something else: the growing, perhaps metastasizing uncoolness of "superhero," period.
Maybe the Russo Bros can resurrect the old spark, but at this point that's going against the flow of what the corporations understand "superhero" to be and what the fans are willing to pay for what "superhero" is, we've got two different viewpoints that are not overlapping.
Every genre runs out of gas and has to be innovated to get it back into the good graces of the fans who support it, and that hour is here for superhero movies at the cineplex.
Thunderbolts* comes in May, and hopefully it is pretty-good to damn-good,* and that will ease the way to the real test in July with James Gunn's Superman and Marvel's Fantastic Four: If both of those flame out it doesn't mean the end of superhero movies, but it does mean the end of superhero movies standing in for "sure-thing" blockbuster money-makers worth big financing to get expensive stars and expensive effects, something that has been a constant since superhero movies joined Hollywood's billion-dollar club.
But, maybe that's what's needed, for Superhero, inc., to slide down from prestige money-soaked operations with all the attendant hangers-on there only for the cash and back into shlock territory where the "true" professional movie-making fan is doing it because of a love for the genre (and hopefully an understanding of it) and they're backed up by make-a-buck financiers who don't care about the art or the genre, but about making sure the fan is satisfied who will empty their pockets for something they like, and also, will use word-of-mouth to tell their friends to do likewise, a domino effect that has vaulted many a film from mid-level to high-end when it comes to box office.
* It looks like Thunderbolts* might be in the mode of the Black Widow movie, at least visually and of course since it is picking up a few of the characters. Black Widow cost somewhere between $200 to $288 million to make and approximately $100 million to promote. It made only $379 million at the box office. To break even, a film needs to make double its cost since theaters generally keep half, so, in effect BW bombed.
Related: The Billion Dollar Club of Superhero Movies
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Original Page March 27, 2025