It’s the end result that nearly everyone saw coming: In adding one last negative franchise record to its running list of accolades, with its theatrical run coming to a close, The Marvels will officially go down in the history books as the at-current lowest grossing entry in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Having hit theaters on November 10th, The Marvels‘ industry-standard four week theatrical run came to a close on the weekend of December 3rd, at which time the MCU’s latest entry’s total purse, per box office tracking outlet The-Numbers, sat at a measly $80,752,350 domestically.
Internationally, that same time-frame saw the triple-team-up adventure pull in just slightly more at $116,300,000, bringing the film’s worldwide total to just $197,052,350.
For comparison, this worldwide total comes roughly $70k behind the previous holder of the title of ‘The MCU’s Lowest Grossing Film’ The Incredible Hulk, whose 2008 gamma-irradiated outing ended its theatrical run with an international, unadjusted-for-inflation gross of $265,573,859.
The Hulk’s performance already leaps-and-bounds over the Marvel trio’s, the disparity between the two MCU entries becomes even more stark when the cumulative U.S. 2008-2023 inflation rate of 42.9% is applied to the former film.
In light of this calculation, The Incredible Hulk‘s theatrical box office gross can be equated to $379,508,761 – a full $124k over The Marvels.
Thanks to this abysmal performance, Disney announced on Monday that “With The Marvels box office now winding down, we will stop weekend reporting of international/global grosses on this title.”
Notably, with the film still set to play in theaters until at least the New Year, Disney’s abandonment of The Marvels appears is less ‘falling victim to scheduling conflicts’ and more the company throwing in the towel on their greatest disappointment.
As noted above, this bottom-of-the-barrel accolade is but the latest to be taken home by the glorified Disney Plus special.
Previously, The Marvels set such new and historical MCU lows as ‘Worst opening weekend box office‘, ‘Worst first Monday box office‘, and ‘Worst second weekend drop off‘ (a record it also holds for comic book films in general, beating out the previous ‘winner’ of Morbius) – all of which, like the above record, were previously held within the franchise by The Incredible Hulk.
Yet, while there are numerous and apparent factors that led to audiences’ general disinterest in the sci-fi caper – including but not limited to its poor script, less-than-popular lead actress, and a heavy marketing focus on its post-credits scene over anything else – Disney CEO Bob Iger believes that The Marvels woes stem from two specific issues.
Speaking to attendees during the recent 2023 edition of the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Iger specifically blamed the failure of Captain Marvel, Photon, and Ms. Marvel to take-off at theaters on nothing more than it being “shot during Covid and there wasn’t enough supervision on set [from executives].”
However, unsurprisingly, Iger did not expand any further on these arguments.
NEXT: ‘The Marvels’ Review – The Worst Written MCU Film Of All Time