How can one measure success in modern Hollywood? For sure, there is critical acclaim, which multiple upcoming 2024 movies would love to earn. But mostly, it’s box-office performance that measures the success of a series – and in the realm of upcoming superhero movies, they all weigh themselves against each other. You can play the Marvel versus DC debate, even though Kevin Feige has told us that casual fans don’t know the difference between the two. And then there are Marvel competitions between the individual heroes. Of which, Spider-Man is the king.
With the summer blockbuster season coming to a close, Marvel Studios absolutely is taking a victory lap thanks to the overwhelming success of Shawn Levy’s Deadpool and Wolverine. The R-rated sequel managed to pull off a lot of surprises, from cameos to the expansion of the MCU Multiverse, introducing the concept of Anchor Beings. Something tells me that is going to become an important part of Marvel storytelling as we head into Avengers: Doomsday and its follow up, Avengers: Secret Wars. But even though Deadpool and Wolverine has gone on to bank $1.2 billion (and counting), the movie didn’t earn enough to help the Merc with a Mouth (Ryan Reynolds) overthrow Spider-Man as the box office champion.
Mind you, Spider-Man has the benefit of having his own team up movie that pulled in the remnants of the Sony Spider-Man movies, similar to the way that Deadpool and Wolverine drew from the ashes of the Fox/X-Men/Marvel universe. Thanks to Jon Watts’s Spider-Man: No Way Home earning $1.9 billion with the combination of Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire together on screen for the first time, the Spider-Man franchise enjoys – just in the MCU alone – a $3.9B gross in global tickets sold. Deadpool got close, thanks to the success of Deadpool and Wolverine. But after you add the tally for Levy’s sequel – which earned $1.28B according to The Numbers – the Deadpool trilogy now sits at $2.85 billion. That’s good for second place.
Do you know what’s most impressive about this accomplishment? The Deadpool movies carry an R rating, thereby limiting the potential amount of audience members they can bring in, over a Spidr-Man film that can play for an entire family. Deadpool is for mature audiences. Always has been. But the overwhelming praise for Deadpool and Wolverine, and the fact that Marvel Studios helped to turn the sequel into an Event Movie, pushed the Merc over the collective earnings of other Marvel heroes and their franchises, from Thor ($2.7B) and Iron Man ($2.4B) to Captain America ($2.2B).
These numbers skew if you were to try and figure in the Avengers franchise, which has two of the biggest movies of all time in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. And with the way the franchises are going, I’m not sure that I see another hero catching Spider-Man. Possibly Black Panther, as the first movie did earn $1.3 billion, and its sequel got close to the billion-dollar mark. But with Spider-Man 4 on its way, I think the wallcrawler only continues adding to his tally, and maintains his grip on the superhero box-office throne.
