Fed up with all those superhero movies cluttering up the multiplexes and forcing your delicate black-and-white Lithuanian goat-herding tragedy on to a single screen at 10am on a Tuesday? Angry, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, that a $300m CGI raccoon gets more screen time than the slow and haunting meditation on existential despair your favourite auteur spent a decade working on?
For you, then, the darkest days of comic book movie hegemony may be over. A quick peek at the theatrical release calendar suggests that there is not a single new major-studio superhero flick due to hit multiplexes in the next six months. That’s right, a full, blissful half a year – which hasn’t happened since May 2011. For years, the anti-comic-book brigade have insisted superhero movies are sucking the oxygen out of cinema and killing originality. Now, the great superhero drought of 2025 makes it look as though their side has finally prevailed. And maybe, after the best part of two decades of interchangeable third-act rubble fights and billionaire orphans growling about destiny, that’s as it should be.
For those of us who are really rather fond of superheroes on the big screen, however, it feels like a worry. Six long months with no multiverse chaos or retconned origin stories?. What is going on? Is the comic book movie really dead? Did audiences finally get superhero fatigue? Or could it just be that the studios looked at their balance sheets, remembered Madame Web happened, and decided to give us all a six-month palate cleanse before trying again?
Disaster movie … remember Madame Web? Photograph: Jessica Kourkounis/Courtesy of Sony Pictures
The truth is that the gaping desert in the release schedule where quite a few superhero movies would usually be is the result of a perfect storm of misfires, budget panic and inter-studio meltdowns. DC fired its last cinematic universe into the sun (and hasn’t given James Gunn much time to get its new one into shape), Sony quietly strangled its live-action Spider-Man spinoff plans after Kraven the Hunterflopped. And Marvel, once the unshakeable titan, has begun watching its pennies too. Reports in Hollywood suggest the studio’s big plan for Phase 7 is to finally introduce the X-Men into the MCU, but with cheaper, younger unknowns rather than the expensive A-listers that permeated the 20th Century Fox films. This is partly because China no longer loves Hollywood cinema like it did in the halcyon, pre-Covid era, and partly because any studio that makes such eye-wateringly expensive duds as Eternals, Ant-Man: Quantumania and The Marvels is bound to have to consider cost-cutting issues sooner rather than later.
Ironically, last month Gunn delivered Superman, the first well-reviewed film about a major DC titan since Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman in 2017. Marvel looks to be getting back on track following early box-office success for Fantastic Four: First Steps, which has also been well-reviewed. But just as one swallow does not a summer make, two vaguely competent superhero movies don’t magically erase a decade-long franchise hangover. The superhero slowdown isn’t just about artistic self-reflection. It’s a combination of bruised egos, battered spreadsheets, and the realisation that studios have relentlessly mined every character in the Marvel and DC back issues, including that one guy who appeared for two panels in a 1973 issue of Spider-Man whose power was talking to lightbulbs.
Early success … Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm and Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards in Fantastic Four: First Steps. Photograph: Marvel Studios/PA
The issue is basic box office maths. There was a time before Covid when you could slap a cape on an actor, throw in a Stan Lee cameo, and reliably hoover up a billion dollars before lunch. Now? Global audiences, particularly in China, have stopped treating every MCU release like a religious festival. And once your international market yawns, suddenly all those $250m CGI slugfests look less like guaranteed jackpots and more like prestige vanity projects in tights.
The other elephant in the room is that streaming blew a hole in the business model. During the pandemic, Disney+ and HBO Max became superhero graveyards, funnelling B-tier projects to streaming audiences, and teaching them they could just wait a few weeks and then watch at home. The illusion of urgency – the idea that you had to see every film on opening weekend or risk missing the next puzzle piece – now seems ridiculous.
Which brings us to the current vacuum, which may be less the heroic victory for cinema some may have hoped for, and more an emergency reset button. We may get six glorious months free from multiverse migraines and quippy alien invasions. But don’t kid yourself: it’s just Hollywood taking a breath and trying to figure out how to sell you more superhero movies next year.
