By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
It’s almost impossible to overstate how successful Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been. It didn’t take very long at all for Marvel’s latest superhero movie to earn over $2 billion in worldwide sales. For context, it’s rare for a movie to earn “only” $1 billion in its entire theatrical run. The fact that Brand New Day did so in less than a month is, well, amazing. Like, that’s over twice as much as Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps earned together just last year. The consensus among superfans has been the same: Marvel’s back!
Of course, the poor performance of last year’s superhero films proves why this Marvel comeback is so impressive. For a long time, the studio’s biggest movie always earned over a billion, but that became less and less common amid the public’s collective superhero fatigue. Some thought that fatigue was here to stay and would forever keep Marvel from releasing another smash hit; now, nobody can deny the studio still knows how to produce something truly great. However, Spider-Man shouldn’t get too comfortable on his webbed throne; based on presales, it looks like Avengers: Doomsday will absolutely destroy Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the box office!
Spider-Man Meets His Doom
Riding the wave of hype for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Marvel recently did a full-on marketing push for Avengers: Doomsday. This included promoting the film at major events like San Diego Comic-Con and D23 and dropping a new, buzzworthy trailer online. All of this culminated with something as inevitable as Doom himself: a chance to pre-order tickets to the movie. The studio opened up these presales over four months before the movie’s premiere, which serves as a great way to keep the hype train going. At the same time, these early sales would help Marvel gauge exactly how successful Doomsday would be.
Fortunately, these early numbers paint a very rosy picture for Marvel Studios. In the first two days of presales, sales were up 65 percent compared to Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Now, early sales obviously aren’t a perfect barometer of how well a movie is going to perform at the box office. Nonetheless, they help gauge exactly how eager fans are to see an upcoming movie. Solid presales for Brand New Day, for example, helped predict that movie would be a massive success. Much better presales for Doomsday, meanwhile, imply that fans are even more excited to see this upcoming film.
Avengers Fans: Assemble!
What makes this even more remarkable is that presales for Brand New Day opened up only 45 days before the film’s premiere. Opening only a month and a half ahead of the release gave Marvel plenty of time to build hype for the movie long before they opened sales. However, they opened Doomsday sales up over four months before that movie hits theaters. The fact that it outsold Brand New Day so quickly despite not coming out for many months is further testimony to how excited the fandom is to see this movie.
There are plenty of reasons to be excited, of course. This is the first Marvel movie to bring Robert Downey Jr. back since Avengers: Endgame. And it’s the first one to bring Chris Evans back as Captain America (though he did memorably play Johnny Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine) since Endgame. Throw in cameos from the original X-Men and an entire multiverse of other supporting characters, and there is plenty for fans to look forward to. But are the presales a solid omen of the movie’s success, or will Spidey ultimately come out on top? Rest assured, true believer, we’ll find out when Doomsday hits theaters in about four months!
