Update: The follow-up connecting what the safe era was actually for is now live: massive Star Wars reboot incoming, hinted by Marvel’s own reset.
Two quotes from Monday’s episode of The Town, and together they explain the last eighteen months of franchise filmmaking.
While talking about the biggest losers of 2026, which includes James Gunn and Kathleen Kennedy, Puck’s Matt Belloni, on Lucasfilm: “They played it absolutely safe and it’s blown up in their face.”
Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, on why he passed on Supergirl in the show’s box office draft: “I just figured, clearly incorrectly, that the floor on a superhero movie was still like 250, 300. This movie is not going to sniff two.”
They were talking about two movies.
It applies to five.
Marvel, DC, and Lucasfilm have now all run the same play and gotten the same result, because the thing that used to make “safe” profitable no longer exists.
The floor was the fanbase.
The floor is gone.
Five Movies, Same Collapse Pattern
Look at the shape of these runs, not just the totals.
Captain America: Brave New World opened to $88 million, dropped roughly 68% in its second weekend, and finished around $415 million worldwide. The legacy-handoff play.
Thunderbolts opened to $74 million and finished around $382 million worldwide. The B-team repackaged as “The New Avengers.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps opened to $117 million, Marvel’s best of the year, then collapsed roughly 67% and finished around $521 million worldwide on a $200 million+ budget. Breakeven-ish for the movie that was supposed to launch the First Family into Avengers: Doomsday.
The Mandalorian & Grogu is at around $340 million worldwide, the lowest-grossing Star Wars project ever. Two good episodes of TV, priced like a movie ticket.
Supergirl opened to $37 million, suffered a 76.8% second-weekend collapse ranking sixth-worst all time, and is projected for a $244.3 million theatrical loss. The second movie of the rebooted DCU.
That shape means the same thing every time: general audiences show up once on brand recognition, do not come back, and there is no fanbase underneath to catch the fall.
For decades, the fanbase was the safety net that turned mediocre franchise entries into $600 million grosses. Every one of these movies fell straight through where the net used to be.
The Floor Was The Fanbase
Shaw’s number is worth sitting with. The floor on a superhero movie used to be $250-300 million, not because the movies always earned it, but because a core audience showed up out of loyalty and habit no matter what.
That was the subsidy every studio quietly built its budgets on.
That subsidy is dead, and it did not die by accident.
We have documented the erosion for years.
Star Wars lost as much as 85% of its audience, and the fix made it worse. The Mandalorian’s own Nielsen ratings dropped nearly 40% before anyone thought putting it in theaters was the answer. Marvel’s Disney+ era trained its audience that nothing is essential. And after a decade of franchises lecturing the customers, the customers did the one thing studios never modeled.
They left.
“Playing it safe” was never the disease. It is the last symptom. Safe means programming for an audience you assume is still in the seats.
These studios kept making the safe play for a fanbase that had already walked out of the building.
Thunderbolts Exposes The “Just Make Good Movies” Cope
Here is where the usual defense falls apart.
The reflex answer to every bomb is “just make good movies.” Fine. Thunderbolts was the well-reviewed one, sitting at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and 93% from fans, and it could not even manage the front-loaded opening the others got.
If quality were the variable, Thunderbolts performs. It did not.
Same story with The Mandalorian & Grogu. Belloni himself stipulates “the movie was fine. Favreau did a good job.”
Fine did not matter.
Two decently made, well-reviewed (at least by fans) franchise entries produced the same outcome as the maligned ones because the problem was never just one bad movie. It is the burned relationship underneath all of them.
You cannot review-score your way out of a decade of alienating your own base.
Originals Are Winning In The Same Market
The kill shot for every excuse — superhero fatigue, theaters are dying, streaming ate the business — is that the overall market is healthy.
As noted on the same episode of The Town, the box office is up roughly 15% this year and on pace for the first $10 billion domestic year since 2019.
Look at what is actually winning.
Obsession just crossed $400 million and became Focus’s biggest movie ever, an original horror film from a YouTube director. Likewise, Backrooms is nearing $350M.
Project Hail Mary is a big hit that, per the same episode, “reasserted [Ryan Gosling’s] primacy as a star who can get movies made almost on his own.”
The Michael Jackson biopic is heading to $1 billion.
Audiences did not stop going to movies. They stopped showing up out of obligation.
Originals and star vehicles are thriving in the same marketplace where legacy IP is dying, because they never had a subsidy to lose. They were built to earn every ticket.
That is the new rule for everyone now: every franchise film performs like an original. The brand gets you one weekend. The movie has to do the rest, and “safe” earns nothing.
Doomsday vs. Starfighter Is Already On The Calendar
Which brings us to the two biggest bets on the calendar, because Marvel and Lucasfilm have answered the same crisis with opposite plays.
Marvel’s answer is Avengers: Doomsday, the biggest safe play ever constructed, nostalgia stacked to the ceiling.
Lucasfilm’s answer is Star Wars: Starfighter, an actual movie-star vehicle with new characters, fronted by the guy the industry just crowned a winner of 2026.
On paper, Star Wars: Starfighter is the riskier bet. By the logic of everything above, it is the only kind of bet that has been paying out.
Worth noting, though, as we lay out in our follow-up on the incoming Star Wars reboot: Starfighter is also a Kennedy-produced standalone built on a familiar template, so consider it the transition, not the new era.
One of these approaches is about to be very publicly right.
And meanwhile, the rest of Hollywood has already done the math, receipts in hand, and started courting the audience it spent a decade shunning.
The floor does not come back on its own.
You rebuild it one earned ticket at a time.
