Update #7: Sony boss Tom Rothman confirms what we say about superhero fatigue: âThe Audience Is The Boss.â
UPDATE 6: The crown is Spidey’s. Monday’s actuals made it official at $360 million, the biggest opening weekend in box office history, dethroning Endgame after seven years. The “fatigued” genre now holds the all-time record, and IMAX just added its screens for the encore. This column rests.
UPDATE 5: The final count is in. 24.1 million people bought a ticket this weekend, the biggest crowd of the modern box office era, for a $355 million opening that came within $2 million of dethroning Endgame, with Monday’s actuals still deciding it. That’s the fatigue epidemic: four million more moviegoers than the previous record.
UPDATE 4: Case closed. The fatigued audience just delivered the biggest opening day in box office history at $167 million-plus, past Endgame‘s $157.4 million, with the all-time weekend record in play by Sunday.
UPDATE 3: Now China is in on it. The market Hollywood held up as proof the genre was dead just delivered its biggest superhero opening day in seven years, nearly matching the forecast for its entire weekend in one day. The audience never left. Even in Mandarin.
UPDATE 2: The trades just conceded. Deadline is now projecting a $465 million global opening, Sony’s second-biggest ever, and writes the movie “looks to eradicate all superhero fatigue.” Their words, not ours.
UPDATE: Right on schedule. Brand New Day just debuted at 90% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The reactions delivered, the reviews delivered, and the box office gets its say Friday.
TheWrap says Avengers: Doomsday is up against “a foe more daunting than Thanos,” and that foe is audience fatigue.
Wrong villain.
Superhero fatigue doesn’t exist. It never existed.
And the receipts disproving it are piling up this exact week, in public, with dollar signs attached.
Fatigued Audiences Don’t Do This
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens Friday tracking at $180 million to $190 million, the biggest opening of 2026 and the second-biggest in franchise history.
It’s doing that with the best presales in five years despite being locked out of IMAX entirely.
Avengers: Doomsday cleared $16.5 million in day-one ticket sales selling nothing but premium-format seats, five months before it opens.
The trailer did 500 million views in 24 hours.
And on Saturday night, the supposedly exhausted audience staged a full-on revolt outside Hall H because they couldn’t get INTO the Marvel panel.
That’s the fatigue epidemic: people fighting security to see more of it.
The “Fatigue” Was Always Selective
Here’s the tell that fatigue was never real: it only ever showed up for bad movies.
Quantumania, The Marvels, Love and Thunder, and Eternals underperformed, and the fatigue think pieces bloomed.
Then No Way Home did $1.9 billion in the middle of a pandemic. Deadpool & Wolverine did $1.3 billion. Brand New Day is about to have the biggest opening of the year.
Somehow the fatigue evaporated every single time.
Fatigue doesn’t check Rotten Tomatoes before deciding whether to exist. Audiences do.
What people are tired of is garbage. They watched a run of bad movies, got burned, and started waiting for proof of quality before buying tickets.
That’s not fatigue. That’s a functioning market.
Want the freshest example? Supergirl just collapsed 76% in its second weekend on its way to a quarter-billion-dollar loss, the same month Spider-Man presales broke records.
Same genre, same summer, same “fatigued” audience. The difference is the movie.
Playing It Safe Flopped Too
And it cuts the other way as well, because garbage isn’t the only thing audiences stopped paying for. So is safe.
Look at Marvel’s 2025: Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Feige played it safe with all three. Middle-of-the-road movies, designed not to offend, engineered not to take a single risk.
All three underwhelmed at the box office.
And here’s the part the fatigue crowd can’t explain: there was never any buzz. No 500-million-view trailer. No presale records. No fans rioting outside a panel.
Nothing about them was ever tracking anywhere near what Brand New Day and Doomsday are doing right now, because audiences can smell “good enough” from a mile away, and they price it accordingly.
Bad movies get rejected. Safe movies get shrugged at. Event movies get lines around the block.
The audience is grading the movies. It always was.
The Trades Are Running Feige’s Play
Notice how the excuse keeps mutating to protect the same people.
Kevin Feige says Marvel got “spread thin,” blaming the workload instead of the work.
The trades say audiences got fatigued, blaming the customer instead of the product.
Different jerseys, same dodge: anything but admitting the movies weren’t good.
Cosmic Book News has been saying this since day one, through every fatigue news cycle: the audience never left. It got selective.
Every time Hollywood puts a superhero movie on screen that looks worth seeing, the “fatigued” masses show up with record-breaking money.
Every time it ships a lazy one, they stay home, and a trade writes a eulogy for the genre instead of a review of the movie.
Brand New Day opens Friday. Doomsday opens December 18.
Watch what the fatigued audience does.
For everything on Marvel’s weekend, check out our complete Hall H coverage and our Avengers: Doomsday guide.
