Did Captain America: Brave New World Bomb or Not?

It’s been a slow transition to Captain America 2.0. Near the end of Avengers: Endgame, the jet-winged MCU stalwart known as the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) reluctantly accepts Chris Evans’s vibranium shield, signaling the retirement of one lead and the birth of another. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Mackie’s character Sam Wilson struggles with the burdens of incipient super soldierdom at first but eventually accepts the patriotic cowl. This month, the question hanging over Captain America: Brave New World was simple: Would audiences finally accept the new guy as inheritor of a multibillion-dollar franchise?

Over its three-day opening frame, Brave New World took in $100 million domestically, syncing with pre-release “tracking” estimates, to arrive as 2025’s first blockbuster. Marvel’s fourth Captain America collected an additional $92.4 million overseas, overcoming mixed reviews (most non-fanboy media outlets critically clobbered it) and a B- Cinemascore (the lowest audience exit-poll score of any MCU entry), to effectively snap the studio’s cinematic-universe cold streak after the critical and commercial disappointments of 2023’s The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. (Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.3 billion but technically exists outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe canon.)

This being Marvel, of course, Hollywood observers (including me) are all but obliged to financially and culturally split hairs — to analyze Brave New World’s success as perhaps something less than a hands-down, across-the-board box-office triumph. BNW’s start is only around half of Captain America: Civil War’s $179 million opening in 2016, and while crossing into nine-figure territory is a spectacular debut for any event movie in the post-N95, post-Hollywood strike era, Cap 4’s performance is more in keeping with opening returns for lower-tier Marvel entries such as 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals, or 2016’s Doctor Strange, than more premium MCU offerings like an Iron Man sequel or even the relatively crummy Thor: Love and Thunder (which earned $144 million over its first three days in 2022).

But over its second weekend of wide theatrical release, the $180 million Brave New World once again topped the box office with a $28.2 million performance — besting new competition from director Osgood Perkins’s second movie for Neon, The Monkey, and the Lionsgate-distributed kids flick The Unbreakable Boy (in addition to out-earning the second, third, and fourth films’ grosses combined). The relative dearth of new titles at the multiplex thanks to continuing financial freefall within the entertainment industry is an entirely separate issue that we will not discuss here. That aside, Captain America’s continuing success is actually being hailed by industry insiders as magnificent IP management.

“I don’t want to call Brave New World a reboot; obviously, it’s a continuing story,” says Shawn Robbins, founder/owner of Box Office Theory and director of movie analytics for Fandango. “It’s a character people knew from previous movies and were familiar with. But given the way audiences, and especially people outside the Marvel fan base, look at these franchise movies — when there’s a big change like a lead actor, the box office behaves as if it’s a reboot. One of the brilliant things in Disney’s marketing campaign was highlighting that line in the trailer: ‘You’re not Steve Rogers.’ Because that’s exactly what everybody was thinking.”

Insiders’ reasoning for optimism goes like this: At a time when franchise and superhero fatigue have become supervillains to Marvel’s continuing primacy as Hollywood’s foremost blockbuster factory — and high-profile superhero wipeouts like The Flash (2023), Dark Phoenix (2019), and December’s Kraven the Hunter keep studio C-suite suits sweating — it was hardly a no-brainer that Brave New World’s hero handoff would work. Mackie is a well-known MCU franchise player who has appeared in seven movies (including the previous two Captain Americas and three Avengers titles), co-headlined his own series, and delivered voice work for the Disney+ series What If …, but neither the 46-year-old actor nor his Falcon/Captain character were established box-office draws on their own. Mackie picks up the star-spangled shield as the first Black Captain America at a decidedly transitional moment: when the Trump administration is purging diversity initiatives from government institutions en masse and Marvel’s parent company, Disney, has been publicly scaling back its own DEI efforts, including eliminating a transgender character from the Pixar series Win or Lose and removing content warnings that accompany old movies containing racial stereotypes. (The New York Times felt compelled to defend Mackie’s Cap in a story headlined “Don’t Call Him a DEI Hire.”)

“It was not a foregone conclusion that so many people would show up for this movie,” Robbins says. “There is a lot more selectiveness among casual audiences who have seen hundreds of superhero movies by this point. But this is Captain America. It’s coming out right after the Super Bowl, right after an election year. A lot of patriotism is in play. A Black man is taking on the role of Captain America. They are opening it during Black History Month, which is a smart move.”

To be sure, different actors have been swapped in and out to play the same individual MCU character over the years, with Don Cheadle notably taking over the role of James “Rhodey” Rhodes from Terrence Howard in Iron Man 2. And Harrison Ford subs in as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in Brave New World (after William Hurt defined the character in The Incredible Hulk, Avengers: Infinity War, Captain America: Civil War, and Black Widow among other titles). Marvel comics, meanwhile, established a canonical framework for the Steve Rogers–Sam Wilson handoff in 2012 and more generally provides a rich tableau of heroes switching names, costumes, even power sets. Erstwhile Ant-Man Henry Pym, for one, went on to appear within Marvel’s pages as Giant Man, Goliath, Yellow Jacket, and (for a brief time) the Wasp.

Inspired by the 1975 political thriller Three Days of the Condor, Brave New World pushes genre conventions within the MCU by incorporating plot points such as a governmental-brainwashing scheme, black-site prisons, shadow mercenaries, and a ballistic showdown between sovereign nations. But according to box-office analysts, the Captain America intellectual property — seemingly regardless of who is playing the character — remains ultimately responsible for putting butts in seats. “Recasting Chris Evans with Anthony Mackie did not hurt the series; that’s not easy,” says David A. Gross, who publishes the FranchiseRe movie-industry newsletter. “There have only been six other superhero series that made it to installment No. 4 — that’s elite company — and they opened to an average $75.3 million. By that measure, this opening is very good.”

Brave New World’s second-weekend gross, however, carries a substantial asterisk. It’s a 68 percent drop from the film’s opening three-day total of $88.4 million. Received Hollywood wisdom holds that for a film of Cap 4’s scale, budget, and pedigree, a 60 percent drop would represent a passing grade. A normal level of audience attrition. Business as usual. While a 70 percent drop would immediately signify audience sentiment around the movie has curdled and is impacting word-of-mouth buzz to keep people away from theaters. (For perspective, the much-reviled Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania dropped 70 percent after its $106 million opening and squeaked out a meager $88,000 profit after production and marketing expenses to rank in the bottom percentile of Marvel films earnings-wise.)

Gross points out that no new successful superhero franchise has been launched since Black Panther’s commercial and critical triumph in early 2018. And while rebooted versions of the “classic” comic-book franchises The Fantastic Four and Superman are due in theaters later this year, Marvel’s May-release antihero battle royal, Thunderbolts, will serve as a bellwether for superhero fatigue. “After 15 years of unprecedented, extraordinary growth, the genre stopped growing,” Gross says. “Thunderbolts in early May is an extremely important release. We’ll see how well Marvel can launch a new story and new characters. That’s going to say a lot about where we are with the genre and with Marvel.”