In terms of critical reception, Thunderbolts* has been met with a lot of positive reactions since shortly before it arrived onto the 2025 movies schedule. That includes our own Eric Eisenberg giving it 3.5 out of 5 stars in his Thunderbolts* review, calling it “one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s better movies from the last few years.” Commercially, however, the 36th MCU movie has not been doing well, to the point it’s lost Marvel Studios millions and millions of dollars at the box office.
At the time of this writing, i.e. six weeks after Thunderbolts* premiered in theaters, the movie has only made $371 million worldwide. Now to be fair, it did have a lower budget compared to the average MCU movie, as it cost $180 million to produce and somewhere around $100 million to market. Alas, as Variety reports, Thunderbolts* needed to make $425 million to break even, so it will go down as one of Marvel Studios’ commercial disappointments.
Thunderbolts* is now the second lowest-grossing MCU movie of all, with The Marvels still taking last place at $206.1 million. It followed a few months after the release of Captain America: Brave New World, which was met with more mixed-to-negative reactions and also failed to make much of a splash at the box office, only pulling in $415 million worldwide. So why did Thunderbolts* fail to make the big bucks despite so much positive reception?
It’s weird saying this considering that Marvel Studios turned more niche characters like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Guardians of the Galaxy into household names, but I wonder if it was because most of its characters weren’t that well-known. The exception to this was Bucky Barnes, who’s been a major player in the MCU since Captain America: The First Avenger. And sure, we did meet Ghost back in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, but that had been her sole appearance up until now. The rest of the established protagonists were either introduced in Black Widow, which took a major box office hit due to the pandemic, or one of the Disney+ subscription-exclusive series.
There may have just been enough people who weren’t interested in seeing Thunderbolts* due to unfamiliarity with these characters. Evidently the reveal of the movie alternately being titled The New Avengers also failed to hook in people who missed out on seeing it opening weekend, because Marvel did not waste any time using that title in its marketing. Whatever the reason is, it’s doubtful that the powers-that-be at Marvel Studios has been scrambling to formulate plans for Thunderbolts* 2.
The good news for fans of this team, however, is that we’re not done with them by a long shot. The New Avengers will return next year in Avengers: Doomsday, and I won’t be surprised if they’ll also be in 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.
