The Superhero Movie Is Dying. What Comes Next for Hollywood May Not Be Pretty.

If you’re a fan of movies about comic-book superheroes, 2023 was really not your year. In November, The Marvels registered the worst opening weekend box office of any movie in the 15-year history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom fared even worse over the Christmas holiday, bringing in just $40 million over the four-day weekend. These are terrible numbers for any major studio release, let alone for sequels to movies that grossed over $1 billion worldwide. Only two comic-book films made it to the top 10 for the year—the third Guardians of the Galaxy film in fourth with $845 million worldwide gross, and Across the Spider-Verse two places further down with $690 million—the worst finish for the genre since 2015, not counting the COVID-disrupted 2020. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will probably inch its way up the list, but as it stands, the three worst-performing movies in the DC Comics universe were all released in 2023. It’s a genuinely shocking stumble for what as recently as a year ago still felt like an unstoppable cultural juggernaut.

The rosiest spin you can put on this sudden collapse is that it’s the movie industry equivalent of a stock market correction, roughly disabusing Disney and Warner Bros. of the idea that they can put out substandard super-suit-clad product and expect fans to flock to it out of a sense of duty or FOMO. The strong performance of Across the Spider-Verse and last year’s The Batman ($771 million) is an indicator that audiences aren’t tired of all superhero movies, per se, but specifically of the sprawling and unwieldly universes that now stretch across TV as well as multiplex screens. The studios are responding accordingly: The DC universe is headed for a square-one reboot with 2025’s Superman: Legacy, and Marvel was already scrambling to rethink its strategy even before Jonathan Majors’ assault conviction led Disney to cut ties with the actor who was supposed to serve as the MCU’s Big Bad for the next several years. That leaves 2024 with the sparsest slate of superhero movies in recent memory, with just Marvel’s Deadpool 3 and DC’s Joker: Folie à Deux from the genre’s biggest players. (That somehow leaves Sony, which has the rights to the Spider-Man universe but not to Spider-Man himself, leading the pack, with three movies—Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter, and Venom 3—on the docket.)

The waning of superhero dominance should be heartening news for anyone who cares about attention being paid to a wide range of films. But it’s not clear that the movie industry has a backup plan. The most worrying statistic about the opening weekends of The Marvels and Aquaman 2 isn’t the fact that they so greatly underperformed their predecessors, but that they came in first nonetheless. Barbenheimer’s might was a light in the darkness, an indication there might be a way forward that doesn’t involve locking audiences into decadeslong commitments. But as astonishing as Barbie’s $1.4 billion box office is, it’s barely half what Avengers: Endgame took in during the last full box-office year before the pandemic—a year where Barbie would have finished a respectable fourth.

Hollywood loves nothing more than copying success, but what is Barbenheimer’s takeaway? Oppenheimer is, among other things, the fruit of 20 years of building up Christopher Nolan as a brand-name auteur, and as few Greta Gerwigs as there are, there are even fewer Barbies—intellectual property launchpads that resonate across generations with no cumbersome lore to get tripped up by. Taylor Swift brought new audiences into movie theaters with a record-breaking concert film, but not even Beyoncé could repeat the trick. After a year in which even box-office powerhouse Tom Cruise fell short of the mark, who’s next to pick up the torch?

There are a few bright spots. The traditional art-houses audiences that seemed to have abandoned theaters last year have been making their way back, as witnessed by the healthy domestic showing of The Holdovers (which would undoubtedly have been healthier had it not gone to digital after six weeks of release, and to streaming after two months), and The Color Purple surged ahead of Aquaman on Christmas Day, with the second-largest Dec. 25 opening of all time. (As Black List founder Franklin Leonard noted, it was yet another example of Hollywood underestimating the power of Black audiences.) But these aren’t releases that are going to fill the Thanos-shaped hole in Hollywood’s bottom line, and it’s not clear what, if anything, can.

Next year will bring us Dune: Part II, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and other non-sand-based blockbusters, so we’ll have our share of big-time movies. But can Hollywood wield the same global power without the might of the Avengers or the Justice League? If the superheroes aren’t going to do it for them, the movie industry might have to figure out how to save itself.