2018 has proved to be a banner year for everyone at Marvel Studios. And it’s only July 9th.
Since the runaway success of Black Panther, Marvel’s film franchise has been on a roll, serving up an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride in Avengers: Infinity War and the fun, light-hearted spectacle that is Ant-Man and the Wasp.
The latter movie opened to a solid $75M at the domestic box office for a worldwide cume of $161M, and it’s this figure that’s helped pushed the Marvel Cinematic Universe past the $17 billion mark.
Box Office Mojo has crunched the numbers to reveal that, after 20 movies in just 10 years, the MCU’s unadjusted total currently stands at precisely $17.06 billion worldwide, which is higher than that of Star Wars ($9.47B), Warner’s Harry Potter franchise the ongoing Fantastic Beasts prequel saga ($8.53B) and the illustrious James Bond series ($5.01B), which is pretty incredible when you consider that the MCU only flickered into life back in 2008. Oh how far we’ve come.
This success is truly unprecedented in the movie sphere, and echoes that of Marvel Comics during the heyday of Stan Lee and the late, great Steve Ditko.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows no sign of letting up, either, what with another three big-budget blockbusters slated for release in 2019. They include a standalone Captain Marvel movie (finally!), the so-far untitled Avengers 4 and Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker’s second solo MCU adventure that looks set to place our friendly neighborhood Web-Head on a collision course with Mysterio.
Jake Gyllenhaal has inked a deal to play that particular Spidey villain, proving that, even after all these years, the MCU is still able to attract A-list talent. And long may that continue.
