When you write about box office results every weekend as I do, you can't help but notice certain patterns, and one of the most impactful in recent years has been front-loaded performances by movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The blockbusters continue to do well when they debut in theaters, with excitement for the canon still very much a thing, but the principal issue has been audience retention. Significant weekend-to-weekend drops are not a problem that we see with every MCU title (Jake Schreier's Thunderbolts* dipped only a modest 55 percent earlier this summer), but we have a new one to discuss today.
Riding on a wave of mostly positive pre-release responses and years of waiting for the popular main characters to return to the big screen, Matt Shakman's The Fantastic Four: First Steps had a notable start to its theatrical run (the fourth biggest domestic opening weekend of 2025 so far), but crowds thinned out for its second Friday-to-Sunday. It's not the most egregious example of this second weekend phenomenon for the MCU, and the film still managed to hold its top spot in the rankings, but it's hard not to see the results as disappointing. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
