After nearly a decade, Marvel fans have come to a realization that DC fans have been advocating for a change since 2016. This shared understanding unites the two fan bases uniquely.

After its first two weekends of release, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the 37th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, experienced a 66% second weekend box office drop and sits at $198.4 million earned domestically and $368.7 million earned globally in its first ten days.

After two previous 2025 releases for the MCU, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* underperformed at the box office, many are pouring dirt on the alleged grave of Fantastic Four, proclaiming the second week drop off as the death knell of yet another flopping performance by an MCU movie.

The doomsaying has led aggrieved Marvel fans to proclaim the following: “Box office has NOTHING to do with the quality of a movie!”

Yes, Marvel fans. We know that. We’ve been telling you that since Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice released.

When comic book movie fans first started paying attention to the box office many years ago, it was a different era. The early 2000s were a time when comic book movie franchises were much shakier than they are now. It was a time of uncertainty, when every movie seemed to be on thin ice, and opening weekends played a massive role in whether or not superhero movies would continue to be a viable genre in Hollywood.

With the successful launches of X-Men and Spider-Man in 2000 and 2002, the genre started to solidify. However, fan expectations still centered on “here’s hoping we get a good trilogy,” which was the sentiment echoed in 2005 after Batman Begins had fans grinning from ear to ear. The Dark Knight Trilogy fulfilled this wish, and it also marked a turning point when The Dark Knight became the first comic book movie to gross a billion dollars at the box office.

That same year, Marvel Studios released Iron Man, launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now that the sky was the limit for box office potential, it didn’t take long for Marvel to join the billion-dollar club with The Avengers just four years later, the same year that The Dark Knight Rises followed up its predecessor with another billion-dollar box office. Comic book movies became less a question of “will they make money?” and more a question of “how much money can they make?”

The fan discourse followed suit, with trades and enthusiasts starting to track earnings as a measurement of success instead of determining whether or not sequels were coming. The sequels were all but assured, provided the first movie was a success, and the MCU continued to print billions through its first two phases.

Then 2016 happened, the year that DC Films added a sequel to Man of Steel that got blasted by critics and gatekeepers despite earning $874.3 million and objectively turning a profit for WB. That’s when they told us DC fans that anything less than a billion dollars for a film with Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in it was an abject failure, especially since the marketing budget, which no one had ever paid much attention to before, surely ballooned the cost of the movie past $400 million, a number that to this day has never been officially confirmed by WB, because studios don’t release formally marketing budgets.

Now, it’s easy for you, reading this, or for any other Marvel fans, to point straight at the hellsite, Rotten Tomatoes, and remind us of the umpteenth time that critics hated the movie, while the audience was at best polarized over it. Still, none of that changes the fact that BvS had a much higher opening weekend than The Fantastic Four: First Steps at $166 million, but experienced just a one percent higher second weekend drop off at 67%.

That drop off, coupled with the hellsite scores, was enough for WB to order a slew of changes to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, and eventually the hatchet job on Zack Snyder’s original cut of Justice League that would be Frankensteined into the Joss Whedon theatrical abomination released in 2017. All of this effectively killed the DCEU just five movies in, despite Walter Hamada’s aimless attempts to salvage it after Aquaman grossed a billion dollars in 2018.

Now we’re looking at a Fantastic Four film that, despite strong hellsite scores and word of mouth, MIGHT crack $500 million globally and is being projected to finish BEHIND DC Studios’ Superman film released two weeks earlier. Marvel fans are urging us to disregard ticket sales and focus solely on the movie’s subjective quality, as that’s what truly matters to the audience.

Again, yes. We know that, Marvel fans. We’ve only been telling you this for nearly a decade now.

The Fantastic Four box office discourse is highlighting the same scourge seemingly borne out of the BvS box office discourse: scoreboard mentality. The delusional belief that the movie you prefer from the studio you like is better simply because it made more money than the movie from the other studio did, which has been nothing short of delusional corporatism from the beginning, since that box office is money coming out of your pocket, and going into the bank account of a billionaire CEO.

So when you praise Marvel Studios OR DC Studios for having a superior box office than the other, you are rooting for the success of billionaires who couldn’t care less about you and only care about the $15-$20 out of your bank account that bought a ticket to said movie. That’s all the more reason you shouldn’t do it, even before getting to the fact that the box office only measures how popular a movie is, not how subjectively good or bad it is.

The devolving of the box office conversation in the past decade proves that, for the most part, we are not responsible enough to have rational discussions about movie box office, because too many people are only interested in using it to win an argument. If you’re anti-James Gunn, then you’re using the box office to prove that Man of Steel is somehow better than Superman(2025) since it made more money. If you’re anti-Marvel, then you’re using the box office to prove that the MCU is dying since most of their movies have underperformed in the past few years.

In both cases, as with all other box office arguments, you’re ignoring a ton of different context, like the difference in economies and audiences in 2013 compared to 2025, or how much 2020 decimated and changed Hollywood’s box office, making any pre-2020 expectations unrealistic today.

In the end, the box office discourse became noise, and for most of the MCU’s existence, its fans didn’t have to deal with it. Now that the MCU isn’t the darling of perfection it used to be, the noise has invaded their calm, and they don’t like it one bit.

DC fans have been drowning in that noise for the past nine years, with only Aquaman and Joker as our momentary billion-dollar breaths of air, and even both of those had conditions attached to them. We want to enjoy our movies too, regardless of all the noise about earnings, marketing budgets, and multipliers. Maybe now Marvel fans are finally understanding our pain and won’t be so quick to throw numbers in our face when we enjoy our movies, since they don’t like the same done to them.