5 Reasons Why Marvel Will Lose Big On Captain America: Civil War

3. The Precedent

In looking at the history, the first two Captain America movies made total lifetime grosses of $370,569,774 and $714,766,572 respectively. Net profit for The Winter Soldier was $166.2 million. Not shabby, but as stated earlier, Civil War will almost certainly cost more to produce. While it will still likely do better business than Winter Soldier, Cap 3 can realistically expect to fall into the $700 million range, as opposed to the $1 billion+ of The Avengers. Historical precedent isn't painting a very green picture. At the end of the day, the Captain America franchise just hasn't hit the financial milestones of the Avengers, or even Iron Man movies. While a great superhero flick, Age Of Ultron also didn't strike the same cultural chord as its predecessor, which will likely affect following MCU films. From a purely economic standpoint, Marvel peaked in 2012-13 with The Avengers and Iron Man 3. AoU didn't do significantly better business than Iron Man 3, and the next highest individual character film after this was Winter Soldier (which made roughly $150 million less than IM3) in 2014. While there hasn't been enough time or enough films to establish a firm trend, there are a few scary pieces of data in the MCU history. Opening weekend box office numbers are a good canary in the coalmine to measure public interest in the genre. Thor: The Dark World's opening did almost $86 million in November 2013. A year and a half later, Ant Man's opening weekend pulled in $57 million.