The State of the MCU in Charts (Updated 2024)

Header image by @roadtripwithraj via Unsplash

[UPDATE]

I originally published this post back in June 2016, when Captain America: Civil War had just hit theatres. But now, in 2024 the MCU has released 30 new properties, between both movies and TV series (that’s crazy!). And since Google Analytics tells me this article is still popular on my blog, I’ve decided to update this post with data for all MCU properties (inclusive of TV series) up to April 2024 (i.e. up to the release of Echo).

This dataset can also be downloaded for free from Kaggle.

Enjoy.

MCU releases and budgets

First, let’s start with the number of productions and their budgets over the years.

Since 2008 we’ve seen the release of 43 properties, which breaks down to 33 theatrical releases and 10 TV series. What’s crazy is that all 10 TV series have been released since 2021. In terms of production budgets, the producers at the MCU (and Disney) have forked out an estimated $8 billion (USD) since 2008. This is based only on estimated production budgets that I could scrape from sources like IMDB. And I believe the actual investment is probably a lot higher. But still, $8 billion is a huge figure!

MCU box office returns

Next, let’s look at box office returns. The bubble chart below shows worldwide box office returns (as of April 2024) for all MCU IP’s (movies only).

In total, the worldwide box office returns have been somewhere around $29.8 billion from ticket sales alone. And you can see that the Avengers movies have been some of the biggest cash cows, with Avengers: Endgame pulling in nearly of $3 billion worldwide.

MCU domestic (US) versus international box office

I was also interested to see which movies generated more tickets sales in the US versus international. The graphic below shows the proportion (%) of US vs internal ticket sales for all 33 movies.

Interestingly, no MCU IP has generated more than 60% of ticket sales internationally since Spider-Man: No Way Home.

MCU critics versus audience ratings

Next, I was interested in seeing how movie and TV series ratings played out over the years since 2008, across sites like Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and Metacritic (MC). Both RT and MC have a distinct critic score as well as a user/audience score. And one trend I’ve observed is that the gap between critic and audience scores have widened over recent years. To test this hypothesis, I aggregated all critic and user/audience scores from RT and MC, which you can see in the two charts below.

The gaps between RT and MC very different, but the overall trend is similar, which is that we see the gap widening over time (from around Captain Marvel onward). I’m not entirely sure if this widening gap is unique to the MCU, as I feel like I’ve observed this trend happening across the board. But perhaps that’s an analysis for another post.

Also, for good measure, here are the net ratings for all MCU properties (movies and series) on IMDB.

No matter which source you look at, whether it’s Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic or IMDB, there’s clearly been a downward trend in average ratings over time.

Going back to the RT and MC scores, I wanted to find another way to visualize the growing gap in critic versus user/audience scores. So I calculated the net difference for both sources, which you can see in the chart below.

As you can see, the gap between critic and users/audience scores starts to consistently widen across both RT and MC from around Ms. Marvel onward.

Are the golden years of the MCU behind us?

With 43 properties released since 2008, and more than $8 billion invested, I think it’s fair to say that consumers may be getting a little tired of super hero movies (I haven’t even factored in the train wreck that is the DCU). Whether it’s general fatigue or issues with production quality and/or compelling stories and characters, both critics and audiences seem to be less favourable toward MCU releases, particularly from MCU’s Phase 4 onward.

The folks at Marvel/Disney may also be in trouble at the box office as. The Marvels, for example, had an enormous production budget at $270 million, but only managed to bring in $206 million worldwide (that’s not good). Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, another big IP with a hefty budget of $200 million, also failed to deliver strong returns at the box office with $476 million in ticket sales worldwide.

The recent firing of Jonathan Majors, who was being developed as the next big villian to rival Thanos, doesn’t help either.

So, overall it would seem that the MCU is in a rough patch. Personally, I feel that there’s too much of a focus on quantity now. In the earlier days of the MCU we usually only saw 2 theatrical releases per year. But in 2021 alone, the MCU released 9 productions (4 movies and 5 series). That’s a lot of content, and I think if the team at Disney really want to right this ship, they may need to tap the breaks a little and focus on quality of storytelling over quantity of releases.