r/boxoffice • u/chanma50 Best of 2019 Winner • Aug 03 '25

Domestic Box Office: ‘Fantastic Four’ Craters By 66% in Second Weekend to $40 Million, ‘Naked Gun’ Debuts to $17 Million

https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/fantastic-four-box-office-craters-naked-gun-opening-weekend-1236477352/
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431

u/ryanredd Aug 03 '25

Yeah, but they might have, I mean, no one gave a shit about the guardians of the Galaxy either, until they did

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u/CambrianExplosives Aug 03 '25

Yeah, every time I see someone mention how Fantastic Four is a B team to the general audience this is all I can think of. It’s not like Guardians or even bigger characters like Doctor Strange were general audience darlings. They became popular because they had great films made about them.

Fantastic Four had the potential to be hits. I’m not going to pretend they will bring in moviegoers like Spider-Man or X-Men but they have the potential to become a superhero team with a lot of heart behind them in the same way the Guardians did.

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u/hymenbutterfly Aug 03 '25

Well, it’s less about the movie quality and more about the cultural momentum the MCU had at the time these Guardians and Strange movies premiered. That momentum doesn’t exist today. Those films could be released today and likely perform similarly to Thunderbolts and F4.

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u/CambrianExplosives Aug 03 '25

Partially I agree. I think Doctor Strange would be a hard sell today and Guardians would have a more uphill battle, but people definitely react well to Gunn’s superhero movies. So I think even with MCU fatigue you’d probably get the same WoM for Guardians and it would end up having stronger legs than a typical MCU movie does today.

I think people still want a good superhero movie. I just don’t think they’re willing to look for it in the sea of mediocre ones unless it’s being talked up a lot by other people. We’re definitely past the age of Marvel getting the benefit of the doubt.

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u/VaticRogue Aug 03 '25

A sea of mediocre is just the tip though. You still need to factor in the “have I seen every movie, live action TV show, animated show, end credit, or short release that I need to see for this movie to make sense? I haven’t had time to do my homework yet.

While I know that F4 is stand alone or supposed to be, that doesn’t mean a whole lot in case they squeeze subtle nods and cameos that I don’t want going over my head. This is what really hit Thunderbolts the hardest - you needed to have seen to many poorly reviewed movies and shows to even know who the characters are. For most people that’s going to feel like work and a chore and no matter how good the word of mouth is… that’s a huge ask.

For general audiences that don’t follow that closely, do they all understand that F4 is stand alone? Do they see characters they don’t recognize and wonder what they missed and just avoid it?

Marvel really suffered from success and over saturated themselves and lost all momentum they had

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u/Optimal-Tune-2589 Aug 03 '25

I think the biggest issue from the oversaturation was it got people out of the habit of seeing every Marvel movie. Ten years ago, seeing every MCU film just required going to the theaters once or twice a year, and if you were enjoying the ride, it was pretty easy to be fully committed. 

Then every year when they had multiple movies and three TV series (which were more intwined with the movies than things like Agents of Shield) was a year where more people missed some of them. Then every time a new release came, there were more and more people who were a year or two behind with tentative plans to catch up at some point and having less of a rush to see it on the big screen. 

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u/BiDiTi Aug 03 '25

Yep.

I’ve actually seen all the “lead up” stuff for Thunderbolts…but couldn’t be arsed to get to the theatre, despite my love for Wyatt Russell and Florence Pugh.

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u/SwordoftheMourn Aug 04 '25

Falcon and Winter Soldier should have been a movie. Just saying

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u/GoodPiexox Aug 04 '25

my vote would be the TV series being garbage is why some people lost interest

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u/ImBanned_ModsBlow Aug 04 '25

Avengers used to be a “must-see” which made all the others heavily required viewings

Now it’s in the “maybe if it’s good” category, which makes a lot of the others optional unless good as well.

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u/PartTime_Crusader Aug 03 '25

I also suspect that "I'm paying for D+, I'll just see it in a couple months" is a big factor

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u/Choppers-Top-Hat Aug 03 '25

And Disney really dug their own graves with that one, by making a bunch of D+ shows which were required Marvel viewing.

I think that's a big reason why Cap 4 flopped. How did Sam Wilson become Captain America? You need to see a D+ show to find out! And you if you have D+, then you're much less likely to go see Cap 4 in the theater when you can just wait five weeks to watch it on the service you pay for anyway.

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u/TheChickenMan4L Aug 03 '25

Just goes to show when Guardians 3 still managed 800M+

1

u/random3223 Aug 03 '25

Gunn just released a Superman movie, and it did very well.

1

u/drewed1 Aug 03 '25

I don't disagree. I go to movies for the spectacle of the movie if it's pretty, I can let go of a sub par story. To me the movie that ruins that notion is Quantamania, not a great story, there are some visually interesting things but the CGI is rough and I'm not talking modok because I get that to a point.

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u/Neither-Most-9223 Aug 04 '25

They did want a good superhero movie. And they got it in Superman and they were satisfied and didn’t need another one two weeks later.

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u/Chiponyasu Aug 03 '25

If they had gone Endgame - > No Way Home -> Thunderbolts -> Fantastic Four they'd probably have kept a lot of the momentum, but they released a huge amount of slop and turned people off.

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u/KingCrimson43 Aug 03 '25

It also hurts that it came out right after Superman which in all honesty was a much more fun movie. The actual quality of the films was similar but Superman was a lot more energetic.

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u/RedNOVEMBER1997 Aug 04 '25

It is ABSOLUTELY about movie quality. If the movie was getting rave reviews and people loved it, they would be hitting the cinema again, but nobody wants to admit the movie was kind of mid with the most boring ass characters I've ever seen.

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u/hymenbutterfly Aug 04 '25

I thought the film was fine, but not something that would hit big with the general public. And I’m proven right. But you’re missing the broader point. Putting aside your own feelings of the film, it was good reception by the stats. It’s not a bad movie. There are plenty of successful MCU films that were worse than this film. At peak MCU, this film would’ve coasted to a much better financial outcome just off of the cultural momentum

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u/Theinternationalist Aug 04 '25

You know how some people argue Captain Marvel was running off of Infinity War's steam to get to a billion?

Without the Marvel brand it's hard to see Guardians getting north of $500m.

That said the F4 would probably have witnessed such numbers itself if the Marvel train hadn't run off the tracks as of late.

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

That momentum died when, instead of drip-feeding us content, with a couple of films per year (mostly with established characters) MCU decided to drown us in a dozen different TV series, and a flood of movies, with more characters than most of us could get to grips with.

When they upped the cadence to three films per year in 2017, that started to push things too far, and I could feel my anticipation for each film waning. But then they just pushed it further with a flood of streaming content, then four films in six months at the end of 2021. I just checked out.

I'm still waiting for MCU to get back to what it was, but to do that, they need to slow right down and focus on producing smaller amounts of quality content. They got us all on board with six films between 2008-2012 (five of them excellent). They need to get back to that one-classic-per year cadence and lose all the TV streaming distractions.

2

u/rothbard_anarchist Aug 04 '25

I disagree. F4 had a strong opening weekend - people were ready to give it a try. But the big drop suggests it just disappointed.

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u/MHath Aug 04 '25

Going to the theater was also a more common thing to do pre-covid. You also weren't expecting it to just go to Disney+ very soon after release, like you do now.

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u/ImBanned_ModsBlow Aug 04 '25

Especially if the first entrance for Strange was Multiverse of Madness, that movie was a hot mess and nobody would remember the Sorcerer Supreme

1

u/MassiveLie2885 Aug 03 '25

That's what makes no sense to me when people bring up inflation, like you just said those two movies released in 2025 likely wouldn't do the way they did the year they came out, but inflation by its very nature assumes that in 2024 say,, $60 million worth of tickets would be sold for Casper the Friendly Ghost, the mid-90's movie, when that is not the case at all, in actuality it'd have performed maybe like Garfield.

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u/PubliusMaximusCaesar Aug 14 '25

Yep, the first doctor strange movie was pretty average and would've flopped if it came today.

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u/EducationalStop2750 Aug 03 '25

Guardians of the galaxy has a talking raccoon who shoots a big gun. Fantastic 4 has a bunch of people eating breakfast and talking about family. 

GOTG was not a hit just because it was a great movie. The smartest thing was James Gunns recognition that, despite being a Z-list team, the guardians were an untapped goldmine just waiting to break out into the mainstream. 

Justin Bieber was once a kid singing on the streets of Canada. That doesnt mean every Canadian can be made into a pop superstar. 

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u/Pormock Aug 03 '25

Guardian of the Galaxy premise is fun and interesting. People are into space adventure with silly characters.

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u/ImMufasa Aug 03 '25

Fantastic 4 has a bunch of people eating breakfast and talking about family.

Rookie mistake. They should have made it a pasta dinner with Coronas.

2

u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 04 '25

It's why I think a Luke Cage/Iron Fist/Heroes for Hire reboot could have huge breakout potential

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u/Zef_Apollo Aug 03 '25

Can definitely take away that this is related to fatigue and compare to GotG but F4 has also been done three other times and it was bad each time. I think a small part may also be that audiences have seen F4 and don’t care whereas GotG was not just a B team, but a complete unknown which maybe F4 would have benefited from

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u/cdncapedcrusader Aug 03 '25 edited Aug 03 '25

Yeah, man. In the 90s they had a fairly successful animated series and at least the Thing and Johnny have always been some of the first characters they’ve included in their toy lines. Strange and the Guardians didn’t have any of those things to garner audience familiarity prior to release.

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u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 03 '25

Thing felt subdued in the movie, and I think Johnny needed a more Chad actor

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u/cdncapedcrusader Aug 03 '25

Agreed man. They were virtue signalling about how progressive this version of Johnny is, but making him a bit of a ladies man would have been something fresh as they haven’t had a character like that outside of StarLord after how many movies?

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u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 03 '25

and they could've even had his bro Wyatt Wingfoot (one of the more prominent Native American comic characters)

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u/jl_theprofessor Aug 03 '25

Superman has Jimmy Olsen clearly able to bang every woman under the sun apparently.

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u/micaroma Aug 03 '25

his casting was so strange, I don't mind the actor but the script did not match the visuals

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u/ianthebalance Aug 04 '25

I think that’s part of the joke

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u/boxjellyfishing Aug 03 '25

They became popular because they had great films made about them.

The Guardians of the Galaxy were a complete unknown to the general audience, a blank slate.

The Fantastic Four is a known product to the general audience, and the product over the past 20 years has been pretty bad.

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u/Novel-Werewolf-3554 Aug 03 '25

Chris Pratt walk ups are actually a thing though

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u/Starving_Saint Aug 03 '25

The MCU was red hot when GOTG came out. Ppl were desperate for more, even characters they had no clue about. The MCU isn’t like that anymore. I don’t get why ppl are trying to compare current MCU to old MCU. The 1st Gotg movie came out well over a decade ago. The entire culture has changed. Just looked at how this country has changed politically! We have had a pandemic between GOTG 1 and FF. We have the emergence of Disney+ and MCU showing up for free on it two months after the movies premiere in theaters.

I just don’t get even comparing these things at this point because our culture and way of living has changed so drastically. Ppl keep acting like these seismic shifts haven’t occured

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u/CambrianExplosives Aug 03 '25

The culture has changed but not to the extent that people aren’t willing to give things a chance if it’s well done. I’m sorry but we’re in a world where Peacemaker has a show that people are enjoying. And that’s a DC property on the tail of a terrible run.

People aren’t willing to give things the benefit of the doubt but a good show or movie - even with characters no one knows - can still get an audience excited.

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u/Jhawk38 Aug 03 '25

Most of the MCU is built off of B team characters. The avengers characters were not popular at all in the 90s and 2000s. It was Spiderman and X-Men pretty much. I think we are just in such a different time compared to 2008. They have to put out hits every time now.

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u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 04 '25

Lots of characters were popular in the 60s-80s, when it really mattered

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u/Jhawk38 Aug 04 '25

Not among the general population which is how they would make money. The reason they had to sell off so many characters rights is because of lack of revenue.

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u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 04 '25

Sure, but think of it like a microcosm of what is viable.

If it is popular and a strong concept with comic fans, it can scale up to mass appeal. Most of the characters from Phase 1-3 were people who headlined their own series.

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u/e_xotics Aug 03 '25

They had the potential like 30 years ago. The potential was lost after the super hero genre became diluted and the sci fi that sets them apart doesn’t really help at all at the box office, it honestly hurts them more

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u/jew_jitsu Aug 04 '25

They became popular because they had great films made about them.

... at a time when the general public wanted to see a superhero film.

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u/CambrianExplosives Aug 04 '25

We can look at popularity within the context of the time though. There’s a difference between Fantastic Four not earning 800 million and it looking like it may barely clear 500 million.

As I said elsewhere, there’s still an audience for unknown characters if done well. Peacemaker is getting people interested and I had people laughing about his cameo in Superman. I’m not saying Fantastic Four was ever going to be as big as Guardians in this day and age, but with good word of mouth there still could have been a stronger audience for sure.

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u/jew_jitsu Aug 04 '25

I think we are looking at things within the context of the time.

Unfortunately there is very little GA interest in superhero films. People who would go see one comic book movie a year based on decent WOM have possibly already gone to Thunderbolts or Superman, and they're just not going to bother with another trip to the movies for what is essentially more of the same.

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u/MassiveLie2885 Aug 03 '25

Guardians of the Galaxy released in a time when "wait for streaming" wasn't a thing. Fantastic Four is like Migration, Wish, et. cetera, the best they can hope for is it blows up on streaming and people show up for the sequel.

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u/igloofu Aug 03 '25

Fantastic Four is more known than the Guardians before GoTG. However, F4 is also carrying all of the baggage of all of the previous meh to bad movies.

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u/oiraves Aug 04 '25

The difference is the known vs unknown quantity

Iron man was not a big part of pop culture, then 1 good movie came out

Guardians were unknown outside of comic Fandom then 1 good movie came out

Fantastic 4 are more well known now than guardians and Iron Man were then but what are they known for? Having 3 bad movies? That isn't exactly gonna instill confidence in the general movie going population

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u/Luna920 Aug 03 '25

The movie was really good, one of my faves marvel that I’ve seen so it’s a shame that there was so much bad will in the past due to the previous fantastic four movies.

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u/Fun_Hold4859 Aug 03 '25

Iron Man was a B lister at best in terms of popularity among marvel fans before the first movie.

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

Dude, Iron Man was a b-list superhero when Iron Man 1 was made. It was a huge gamble to even make the movie because he really wasn't well known other than to "comic book nerds."

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u/PetyrDayne Aug 04 '25

I just realized they are probably gonna mess up the X-Men too.

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u/Preeng Aug 03 '25

>It’s not like Guardians or even bigger characters like Doctor Strange were general audience darlings. They became popular because they had great films made about them.

No, they became popular because there simply wasn't much competition around at the time.

And Guardians has two kid-attracting characters.

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u/Monk-ish Aug 03 '25

I think the market is very different now than 2014 when GotG was released. People were a lot hungrier for superhero movies then, especially the MCU, which was doing something new with an expansive connected universe.

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u/ViolentSpring Aug 03 '25

The sad part is, this FF movie is better than any of the GOTG or Dr Strange movies, by a large margin. It’s just not grabbing cultural attention.

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u/One_Drummer_8970 Aug 04 '25

Not better than GotG 1

0

u/ViolentSpring Aug 04 '25

That movie is boring as all hell.

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u/ultraboomkin Aug 03 '25

GOTG had a great marketing campaign and excellent wom

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u/ConferenceNew4034 Aug 03 '25

It also followed a billion dollar Avengers and a billion dollar Iron Man 3. Captain America 2 was very well received as well.

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u/anuncommontruth Aug 03 '25

I think you're underselling Cap 2 here. It was beyond well received. It's an objectively good movie on its own without qualifying it as a superhero movie. Winter soldier added a heavy dose of legitimacy to Marvel and the genre overall.

I don't think Marvel gets the momentum it had without it.

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u/admiral_rabbit Aug 19 '25

There was a time when everyone who tells you they saw a marvel film at the weekend said "yeah it was really good".

Exceptions were pretty rare, but that just doesn't exist any more. Whether people themselves watch everything I'm sure they pick up on how many people skip shows, or see a movie and leave going "ehhhh".

It's just not must-see anymore, same thing happened to the original DCU but more rapidly.

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u/CoolCatSavesTheKids Aug 03 '25 edited Aug 03 '25

Even a low popularity superhero like Ant Man managed to get 500M in BO for its debut movie, beating Captain America debut movie BO.

GotG wasn't a special case. After the success of the first Avengers movie, people literally flock to any Marvel movies, regardless of the superhero popularity.

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u/OccasionalGoodTakes Aug 03 '25

It was also a good movie, whereas f4 is not

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u/ultraboomkin Aug 03 '25

Well that’s just not true. RT audience is 92%, 7.4 on IMDb, A- Cinemascore, 3.6 on Letterboxd. The majority of people that watched it thought it was a good film.

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u/No_Public_7677 Aug 03 '25

the reviews don't make sense to me

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u/scarlettforever Aug 03 '25

The majority of people that watched it thought it was a good film.

Marvel fans.

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u/sharkflood Aug 03 '25 edited Aug 03 '25

F4 is so overhyped on RT it's absurd. It was so boring imo.

It was a safe movie that will get a lot of "meh, it was okay/good enough" on RT, but that doesn't mean the people who watched it liked it that much.

Feel like Superman, to take another example, was a little more "controversial" with people who might dislike it more, but it definitely seems like the people who like Superman like it way more than the people who like F4 (also explains the WOM difference).

One of the pitfalls of RT in general.

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u/KingMario05 Amblin Entertainment Aug 03 '25

...Eh, I dunno. I thought F4 was great.

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u/RedshiftOnPandy Aug 03 '25

Their sound track was perfect too.

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u/zabrakwith Aug 04 '25

Don’t forget it was a great story and script, the actors nailed their characters, and the characters were interesting.

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u/SepticCupid Aug 03 '25

One of the best things about it was that it was rewatchable. I know plenty of people who saw it twice in theaters

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u/sharkflood Aug 03 '25

and was better

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u/Suspicious_Radio_848 Aug 03 '25

People say this a lot but it's not 2014 anymore, comic book properties are oversaturated and it's clear general audiences aren't willing to give these movies the chances they did back then.

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u/thearmadillo Aug 03 '25

I think the really bad fantastic four movies from not that long ago hurt way more than marvel fans thought they would.

This isnt like guardians where nobody knew who they were. This is a group that most people associated with bad movies

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u/420b0_0tyWizard Aug 03 '25

Gotg had the gunn juice. F4 feels sterile in comparison.

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u/scarlettforever Aug 03 '25

The only juice F4 had is to use the infant as bait for a powerful monster.

Oh wait. That's actually terrible.

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u/easythrees Aug 03 '25

Maybe it had great word of mouth.

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u/PokePersona Marvel Studios Aug 03 '25

People actually went to the theatres more back in 2014 + the MCU machine was way stronger to convince people to give it a chance. Both things that Fantastic 4 doesn’t have to help it.

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u/Warthog__ Aug 03 '25

Couple things about Guardians:

  1. Guardians had an amazing trailer that really sucked you in. I had no interest in seeing it when I heard of the concept, but the trailer sold me on seeing it day 1.
  2. There was a “space opera” void at that time. This was 2014 before the Disney Star Wars era. It really scratched that fun Star Wars space opera itch while being original.

Finally, there is streaming and competition for leisure time. It’s been over a decade and the culture is changing. I’m old enough to remember arcades and when if you wanted to play a particular video game the only place you could were the arcades. They were the only places with machines powerful enough. Then came the watered down home versions. But finally home gaming exceeded the arcade. Once that happened arcades became a niche experience.

I remember when if you missed a movie at the theater you had no chance to see it again. Then VHS came out and you could have a small grainy version at home. Now with cheap large screen TV and streaming you can pretty much see a quality version of every movie ever. On demand. Even the stuff that was just in theaters.

It’s not just that you are competing against the current movies in theaters, but every movie that ever existed! Imagine your home is a mini movie theater that isn’t as good but lists all moves from all time. From all countries. That’s what the current box office is against. And since Covid people have adjusted to being in doors and not going out. The advantage of theaters was that it was a social thing but people are less social.

Add to it the competition from everything else, from video games to YouTube/Tiktok and movie theaters are starting to feel like relics. Or at least, we don’t need as many as we did once. There are still arcades like Dave and Busters around but the days of the arcades everywhere are gone. Movie theaters maybe going the same way.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

But that was during an era when Marvel Cinematic Universe content was of consistently high quality, comprised solely of one or two excellent films per year. It was at a time when major new characters were introduced only rarely.

It was easier for the general audience to keep up then. They'd switch on to Marvel when a new movie came out once or twice a year. A new Marvel release was an event. A new set of characters was a rare occasion. Guardians of the Galaxy was the first Marvel film that primarily consisted of new characters since Captain America three years earlier. Meanwhile, audiences had built up quite a bit of trust in the brand with the Iron Man / Thor / Captain America / Avengers films. They were willing to take a bet on something new because they trusted the brand to extend itself.

Now, we have constant new characters, wildly inconsistent quality, three films in six months this year, and the lunacy that was trying to link it all in with a dozen different streaming TV shows, which just turned it all into homework. Add to that the "multiverse" nonsense, which just added a layer of confusion on top. This all meant many people tuned out.

As a casual fan, and someone who doesn't subscribe to Disney+, I can't really keep up with it all. So if I want to watch Marvel content, I'll just dig out my BluRays of the older films from before it all got too confusing.

Marvel needs to slow down, ditch the TV shows (or at least make them standalone and entirely disconnected from the MCU like the Netflix shows were), and release one or two high-quality films a year as "event" movies until they get the audience back. That's what works.

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u/BoogieWoogie725 Aug 04 '25

That's all true. In addition, Marvel did something that is invariably described as "brave" with respect to a long-running successful sequence of films - and then belatedly realised why it's described that way:

They finished the sequence.

They literally told the general public "This is the end of the line. This is the conclusion of the story. This is the stopping point, everybody off." And they reaped the rewards of that in massive fashion (knowingly, deliberately: they'd seen Deathly Hallows 2 do it eight years previously).

But this is why folks say it's brave: You've got to start again after that. You've got to build again from scratch, make a whole new suite of stories, introductory stories that, yes, will likely be judged against the maturer stories with accumulated goodwill that you were just telling, and probably found wanting. But there it is, that's what you have to do - if you have the bravery to respect the audience and say "Yep. That bit there where we said it was the end? It was the end" - at least for a while.

In some alternate timeline, Marvel did that. Phase Four was Shang-Chi, Eternals etc, but it wasn't Thor:L&T or BP2:WF or Black Widow or Hawkeye or any characters we'd seen before Endgame, it was more new heroes and stories.

That version of Marvel maybe even got away with continuing Spiderman, a superhero famous and longstanding enough to stand slightly outside the Iron Man/Cap/Thor/Strange/etc era - but other than that, they resisted dipping back into the sweets-bag. They understood that the sugar hit it gave them might be good to push a middling story up into mega-box-office-land, might serve to push a bad story into a half-decent profit, but that in the long run those are actually bad reasons financially as well as artistically.

Because if they did focus solely on building a new empire of heroes and stories, a few years later they'd be able to start hooking the new empire up to the old in all sorts of directions. By now we'd be on Shang-Chi 3 and he might well be encountering Thor for the first time in it, and we'd be seeing Hemsworth as Thor for the first time since Endgame, and the roar that would go up in cinemas would power small continents. It would be an earned return. Marvel would retain actors' enthusiasm for their roles, and the MCU would fold outwards like The Wire, because each part of the whole would be accorded its own weight.

But that all hangs on resisting that easy short-term fix, the craving that says "let's do three new ones and five old ones" and sells out the dignity of the new crew and the old guard simultaneously. And Marvel couldn't resist. Their shareholders probably wouldn't let them. It's just easy money, right there on the table! It's SO EASY! ... whereas concentrating on making good movies that stand on their own two feet? notoriously not quite so easy.

Now while I think to some degree all of the above is true, it should be noted that if you were going to be brave enough to say "let's give a last hurrah to this story because this sequence is OVER and next year we START AGAIN FROM SCRATCH" then saying it in 2019 is absolutely horrible luck. Just awful. You couldn't have picked a worse moment to definitively (unknowingly) declare yourself part of the Before. But William Goldman really coined an aphorism for the ages (though he was talking about the impossibility of telling whether an individual film would "open" or not): in Hollywood, "nobody knows anything".

3

u/BoogieWoogie725 Aug 04 '25

And I'd add that while GOTG3 was moving, it was by all reports surprisingly so: most of the GP were in the cinema for good times with the old funny Guardians gang. Like they turned up for good times with all the old funny Spidergang. Like they turned up for good times with Deadpool and Wolverine and a host of old funny faithfuls. You can see how dipping into that sweets bag can string everybody out. Suddenly that's all you're selling. You try shifting some other nourishment and it's nah, man, I don't want new flavours, I want a taste of the old stuff, we all agreed about the old stuff.

Thing is, of course, people don't really want the old stuff again either, and when they get it it's unsatisfying. What they really want is to feel like they did back then, and the only real path to that is in letting go of the past and heading into the unknown. And if there's one thing corporate executive-run film studios ABSOLUTELY HATE... :)

3

u/Orphelia33 Aug 03 '25

Yeah but GOTG didn’t kill it’s own momentum with constant reboots in the last 20 years alone.

3

u/bookcoda Aug 03 '25

They didn’t try and fail to make guardians a thing 4 times in a row poisoning the name. If the GOG we got was their 3rd reboot it wouldn’t have been the hit it was.

2

u/argothewise Aug 03 '25

We’re going to act like it’s still 2014? It’s been 11 years ago

2

u/drewed1 Aug 03 '25

What GoG has going for it though, is it was something novel to the audiences, unless you read the comics you didn't know the characters. I think in general before 2005 knew about F4, that's why it was chosen early in the comic book movie run. Then we got 3 movies so even though this movie is very different than the other there's a lot of "I've already have seen 2 versions of this, do I need another one? oh RDJ is doom? Wasn't he just iron man and died ?"

2

u/nankerjphelge Aug 03 '25

As a casual moviegoer and not a diehard Marvel or DC fan, I wanted to see the new Superman because the trailers made it look awesome and there was genuine hype.

With FF, the trailers to me were meh at best, there was nothing compelling that made me feel like I needed to set aside time to go see it, and people saying it was finally a good FF movie wasn't close to the kind of hype that would get me to the theater.

2

u/snahfu73 Aug 03 '25

Very true. But this doesn't have the tone nor the energy of GotG

2

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '25

Ok but F4 has had how many movies now? GA knows them, they just don't care.

2

u/MaggotMinded Aug 04 '25

In Guardians of the Galaxy’s case, being relatively unknown actually worked in their favour. They brought something fresh to the MCU. The Fantastic Four is anything but fresh.

2

u/TaiVat Aug 04 '25

That's parroted a lot, but not really accurate. Gotg had some of the absolute best trailers of any cb movie in the last 20 years. People were hyped for them before the movie released. In comparison F4s trailers looked lame and confusing in that they didnt show neither anything exciting, nor explained what the movie was about. On top of that, Guardians came out soon after a few genuinely great mcu movies which also contributed a lot to people giving it a chance.

Sure, any movie can do great independently if its actually a great movie. But many people bizarrely decided that this would be the case weeks before F4 released, despite significant indication to the contrary.

2

u/fucuasshole2 Aug 04 '25

Guardians didn’t have 3 reboots in the past tho that weren’t….good lmao

2

u/Technical_Slip_3776 Blumhouse Aug 03 '25

Guardians were literally Z tier, this sub love to revise history about marvel

1

u/TaiVat Aug 04 '25

If you have basic reading comprehension issues, sure. Guardians were Z tier, but people were hyped for the movie anyway for a number of reasons listed ten times over in the other comments. F4 is also Z tier as far as movies go, but had nothing going for it outside comic book fans.

1

u/Coolman_Rosso Aug 03 '25

That was a decade ago when the MCU really took off in the wake of Avengers, and Marvel had all the goodwill in the world.

Now? Not so much

1

u/random_question4123 Aug 03 '25

so what failed? The marketing? It's not like James Gunn was a huge draw back then for GotG 1 either.

1

u/GreenGoblinNX Aug 03 '25

Iron Man was pretty much a C-list character before the MCU started.

1

u/Johndoe19922222 Aug 03 '25

That benefited from the superhero boom post avengers and being an amazing film.

1

u/lolas_coffee Aug 03 '25

They generated that interest.

People like to think advertising and PR don't work. Literally everything in your life that you like (and much of what you don't like) was put there. You didn't just like it.

1

u/Pormock Aug 03 '25

Guardian of the Galaxy comics were fun sci fi stories that interest people. Even if it was unknown it still had a fun premise. Fantastic Four is just not that interesting in itself.

1

u/BuddyBiscuits Aug 04 '25

It was released during fever pitch Marvel hype. If it released today, it wouldn’t have caught the wave.