MCU and DCU’s Future After a Disappointing 2025—What Hollywood Insiders Really Think
After a year of box office letdowns, industry insiders reveal what’s next for the MCU and DCU—and whether your favorite superhero universe can bounce back.
Every few months, the internet buries superhero movies. Then one of them hits a billion and suddenly the genre is immortal again. This year leaned into the doom side of that cycle, so Variety asked a bunch of folks inside the machine how shaky things really are. Short answer: not dead, just not invincible.
What the people making these movies are actually seeing
- Marvel had three releases this year, and the whole trio landed below the old MCU curve. The summer tentpole was The Fantastic Four: First Steps from director Matt Shakman, led by Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby. It topped Marvel's 2025 slate but still underperformed by pre-2020 expectations.
- Audiences got used to waiting. Between the pandemic shutdown and the streaming firehose, standalone entries feel skippable in a way they did not a decade ago. Translation: if it is not an event, people do not mind catching it later.
- One director put it plainly:
'Any movie could be huge, but nothing is close to a guarantee.'
On the talent side, one agent still calls joining the MCU a career changer, but says fewer clients are chasing cape gigs than five years ago. Why? Two reasons that make sense: there are simply more big swings on streamers now, and a whole lot of the A-list has already done a tour of duty at Marvel.
Marvel's reality check (and the next pivot)
The storyline is familiar: the genre looks wheezy until a mega-hit flips the narrative. Call the hypothetical winners Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday if you want placeholders; once the next genuine four-quadrant event lands, the 'superhero fatigue' obituaries will get tucked away again. But insiders are clear that the old automatic billion is gone. Budgets have to line up with demand, and event status has to be earned, not assumed.
DC is not sinking or sailing ahead of Marvel
Even without insider quotes, the scoreboard says DC is not in a meaningfully better or worse spot. Aquaman's billion was the outlier; Shazam, The Flash, and Wonder Woman's latter outings underdelivered. This summer's Superman, written and directed by James Gunn and starring David Corenswet with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois, did solid business with $614 million worldwide. That is a win over the DCEU's final embers, just not a 10-figure thunderclap.
The more important takeaway from the people Variety spoke to: the movie was good. That matters for momentum. The thinking goes that if Batman and Superman are both clicking at the same time, the ceiling moves up fast.
The weird, inside-baseball part
A marketing exec in the roundup wished the next DC titles were not Supergirl and Clayface. I get it. Supergirl has never had the box office gravity of her Kryptonian cousin, and Clayface reportedly going the R-rated horror route is a cool swing but instantly trims the family audience. Either way, Gunn's off to a confident first step, and the next big test is Man of Tomorrow in 2027, which feels very far away in internet years.
So, are capes cooked?
No. But the bulletproof, print-money-on-opening-weekend era is over. The genre will live on as long as the films are good, truly feel like events, and the budgets stop pretending every release is a guaranteed jackpot. When the next one clears a billion, the funeral will be postponed yet again.
For the record keepers: The Fantastic Four: First Steps hit theaters July 25, 2025, runs 115 minutes, and comes from Matt Shakman with Kevin Feige producing, starring Pedro Pascal as Reed and Vanessa Kirby as Sue. Superman arrived July 11, 2025, runs 130 minutes, and is Gunn top to bottom, with Corenswet and Brosnahan leading. The box office conversation above makes a lot more sense with those two as the year’s tentpoles.