MCU Movies Still Have One Big Problem to Overcome

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However, there’s an even bigger issue that this franchise needs to face, which helps explain why the box office grosses are down. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, despite being owned by Disney and getting heavily marketed to younger viewers, is no longer resonating with kids and families.

Thunderbolts* & The Fantastic Four: First Steps Struggled With Appealing To Families

At the start of summer 2025, only 31% of the Thunderbolts* opening weekend was folks under the age of 25. Just under three months later, just 15% of the opening weekend audience for The Fantastic Four: First Steps was below 18 years old. Compare that to 13 years ago, when the original Avengers had an almost exact even split between moviegoers under or over 25. Roughly 24% of that record-shattering opening weekend came from family audiences. Despite opening nearly five times as big as Thunderbolts*, meanwhile, Avengers: Endgame drew 39% of its opening weekend from folks under 25.

The MCU films were never solely appealing to the Paw Patrol crowd. From the days of Iron Man onward, these titles featured needle drops and cinematic influences (like Three Days of the Condor or John Hughes High School comedies) designed to tickle the nostalgia of folks over 35. However, the 2010s peak of MCU entertainment saw this franchise resonate more profoundly with young people. Hearththrobs like Tom Hiddleston and Sebastian Stan inspired swooning Tumblr posts around the world, while characters never before seen in live-action, like Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy, absolutely belonged to this new generation of moviegoers.

Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, though, a drastic shift occurred. New properties took over the MCU’s place as the go-to pop culture obsession for young people, while Marvel’s universe spreading across TV and movies became too much to keep track of. There was a greater emphasis on darker tones in MCU titles like Multiverse of Madness, Eternals, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which have also inspired families to begin rethinking these titles as must-see entertainment.

Most pressingly, the MCU movies became increasingly obsessed with provoking the nostalgia of older fans. Films like Deadpool & Wolverine and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were rooted in the past; younger moviegoers moved on to Barbie, Super Mario Bros. Movie, or A Minecraft Movie as the big commercial films that resonated with them. The MCU can still bring in hefty box office grosses by appealing to older audiences with rated-R films like Deadpool & Wolverine; however, the franchise has clearly lost its foothold with younger audiences.

Can This Problem With Younger Audiences Be Solved?

While modern MCU projects, such as Captain America: Brave New World, are fixated on story threads from 2008 and adult-oriented political Noir, the franchise’s grip on younger audiences has drastically shrunk. It’s also hard to see this problem getting solved anytime soon; after all, Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars will be full of even more nostalgia, including the return of most of the original 20th Century Fox’s X-Men. Young Avengers characters like Kate Bishop, America Chavez, and Kamala Khan, meanwhile, are currently no-shows, as far as official information about Doomsday goes.

With no characters or plotlines that can resonate or belong to younger audiences, the MCU’s distance from the current crop of younger moviegoers isn’t bound to get better anytime soon. The most obvious immediate solution is for Disney to budget these films better so that they don’t have to appeal to every age demographic to be profitable. Older audiences do still show up in respectable numbers for titles like The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Just make these projects in the $150-160 million range, and this will be less of a pressing issue.

A better long-term concept, though, would be green-lighting more MCU movies focusing on fresh new characters previously unseen in any live-action medium. Rather than rehashing Blade or the X-Men again, making motion pictures about Squirrel Girl, Jeff the Land Shark, Brute Force, or Dazzler could produce entertaining features that belong exclusively to younger audiences. They could have characters that are as specific to their struggles as the Guardians of the Galaxy were to 2010s kids and teens. Tossing aside nostalgic fan-service and yesteryear characters in favor of embracing the new: that’s how the MCU fixes its pressing problem of no longer appealing to folks under the age of 25.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in theaters.