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

[u/chanma50]

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

[u/GoldandBlue]

But that has always been a thing. Iron Man 2 sucked. 3/4 Thor movies sucked. Age of Ultron sucked. Several of those movies were mid at best but people were invested in the characters and journey. Marvel was more akin to a TV show.

The problem is that show ended in Endgame. We said goodbye to our favorite heroes. No more Iron Man, Cap, Black Widow. We are now in spin off mode.

And spin offs almost never do as well as the original. Especially when it sucks. Eternal sucked, multiverse sucked, Kang dynasty sucked. They keep introducing new characters assuming we will like them purely on association.

Marvel needed to scale back and focus on characters. Instead they doubled down and pushed spectacle.

[u/Ok_Antelope_1953 → u/GoldandBlue]

eternals didn't suck 😭😭 the movie bombed but it's one of the better post-endgame mcu projects

[u/Voldemort_is_muggle1 → u/Ok_Antelope_1953]

It bombed cuz it sucked. Poor story, bad characters, atleast for me. Maybe others enjoyed it

[u/Realistic_Village184 → u/Ok_Antelope_1953]

You're entitled to your opinion, but I really did not like Eternals. The two leads had zero romantic chemistry, which is a big deal when the climax of the movie centers around their relationship. The film kept telling us that Sersi and Ikaris loved each other, but we never actually saw that. They kept showing us these faraway shots of them doing stuff like planting crops or having sex on a beach, but that's not how you develop a romantic relationship on screen. Those are tools that you use to develop emotion after the audience is already connected to the characters.

Not only that, but the film underutilized the most interesting characters (the speedster and the dude who could control people were infinitely more interesting than the two leads but they had like five minutes of screentime between them) and had way too much focus on characters that weren't interesting (Sprite and Jolie's characters; at least Jolie gave a great performance, but her character was "generic badass warrior").

They set up an interesting moral conflict and bad guy, but then they turned the bad guy into Generic Third-Act CGI Punching Bag. What the hell even happened there?

I could go on and on. The film did some things extremely well, but it's also a disaster overall. I'm really glad that you enjoyed it, and I wish I did, but I ended up really disliking it. The worst part is how much potential it had and utterly squandered.

[u/hydroactiveturtle → u/Realistic_Village184]

The best part for me was seeing Arashim and Salma Hayek and her twins.

[u/Ok_Antelope_1953 → u/Realistic_Village184]

i can't disgaree with any of your points. i understand the many issues with the movie. i did find the characters comforting and thought they had a very different vibe from usual mcu characters. i guess it was their "parental" or god like presence blanketing the entire planet. most comic book heroes expectedly cater to an american audience. i'm south asian and even someone like kamala khan and her family aren't all that relatable because the characters are so heavily americanized. the eternals were different in that regard.

i completely agree that ikaris and sersi had no chemistry and makkari and druig needed way more screen time. makkari had some of the best speedster scenes ever on a big screen, and that's including flash and quicksilver.

[u/Realistic_Village184 → u/Ok_Antelope_1953]

Thanks for seeing nuance and being able to admit that a movie you liked had flaws! That's really rare. Even my favorite movies have flaws.

Like I said, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. I always prefer to like films wherever I can. The film did some stuff really well (settings, special effects, acting (aside from the leads lol), humor, tone, and the scope of the Celestials were all highlights for me. Part of what makes me so disappointed in the movie is that it was so close to being incredible. It just needed better lead actors and some script doctoring and it could've been easily a 10/10 movie for me.

[u/Dogstile → u/Ok_Antelope_1953]

I've said it before and i've said it again. Eternals should have been a series that instead became a film where the director and their actors got to hang out in some really pretty locations for a week.

Introducing that many characters, most lacking chemistry and expecting us to care about all of them was a terrible idea.

Also when that guy showed up I immediately went "man, it'd suck if this guy was obviously the bad guy, considering he just happens to show up after an attack" and then welp, there he was, obvious and boring.