2022 Was The Year Superhero Movies Lost Their Box Office Dominance
Superhero movies officially lost their monopoly on the box office in 2022. 2008 was a significant year in hollywood history, looking back with the benefit of hindsight. A shared world comprising B- and C-list superheroes whose picture rights had been ceded to other studios or whose rights had returned back to Marvel because they'd been bogged down in Development Hell for years was a risk taken by Marvel Studios. Nobody, not even Marvel, anticipated the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be such a hit.
By the end of 2022, 14 years after their release, MCU films will have raked in over $28 billion worldwide. Phases 1-3 were triumphantly concluded with Avengers: Endgame, which earned close to $2.8 billion globally. With a never-ending stream of movies and tv shows starring characters and ideas as diverse and surprising as Black Adam, Shang-Chi, Miles Morales' Spider-Man, Doom Patrol, the Umbrella Academy, and the Boys, superheroes and comic book adaptations have become all the rage. Despite this, 2022 appears to have been the year that fashion a little bit changed because superheroes lost their dominance over the global box office.
The box office for 2022 is up from 2021, which will undoubtedly give studios a sense of relief. But it's noteworthy that none of the year's major superhero movies—including three MCU blockbusters—broke the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. Venom, a rather unimpressive superhero film, earned over $856 million globally in 2018. Only two of the five superhero movies released in 2022 managed to surpass that improbable milestone: doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Dwayne Johnson had envisioned Black Adam as the reboot of the entire DC Universe, but it failed to gross even $400 million worldwide. It's obvious that fashions in pop culture are evolving.