This article contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Much has been made about what, if anything, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 means for the future of the MCU. James Gunn’s sequel made $118 million in the United States in its opening weekend, and $282.1 million globally. That’s good, but it’s a step down from Guardians 2’s $146.5 million domestic opening (while outperforming its predecessor’s $252.5 worldwide global opening).
It seems likely that Guardians 3 will have much better legs than Marvel’s most recent release, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which enjoyed the trilogy’s best opening, but also suffered the MCU’s sharpest drop in its second weekend. Quantumania is one of the few MCU movies to get a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, while Guardians has gotten good reviews, and is fresh for both critics and audiences. Even people who are sick of the MCU — and I absolutely count myself among them — are still enjoying Gunn’s MCU sendoff.
But that’s the problem. Guardians 3 is a sendoff, both for its writer-director and for the characters he popularized. Though the film has a “Star-Lord will return” tag after the post-credits scene, that return seems unnecessary. Gunn owns these characters and while other writers have been able to get the general dynamics — the Eidos Montreal game from 2021 in particular is pretty good — no one working in the MCU is as simultaneously funny and heartfelt as Gunn. And now that James Gunn is co-CEO of DC Studios, any future Star-Lord adventures won't be written by the filmmaker who has shepherded the character thus far. Star-Lord may return, but it will be the kind of return the MCU has offered since Avengers: Endgame — diminishing.
It’s difficult to know what anyone besides the most hardcore audience member even has to care about anymore. Chris Evans, Robert Downey, Jr., and Scarlett Johansson have all left the franchise. Zoe Saldana has said she doesn't plan to reprise her role as Gamora after Guardians 3. Jonathan Majors, on whom Marvel was hanging the next two Avengers movies, was arrested for assault earlier this year, prompting plenty of speculation from fans about how the MCU could move forward, with or without him in the role of the saga's chief villain, but no comment from Marvel.
And, between Guardians 3 and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the MCU seems to be saying goodbye to the non-Avengers blockbuster franchises, as well. Even if Star-Lord will return, it's totally unclear what that would look like without Gunn or the rest of the Guardians. Black Panther, meanwhile, was structured as a farewell to Chadwick Boseman and his incarnation of the character. The grief the filmmakers felt for the passing of the real man was channeled into the sendoff of the fictional character he played. Though Wakanda Forever set Shuri up as the next Black Panther, and introduced a major new character with Ironheart, the movie felt like a cathartic endpoint more than a set-up of anything new.
With so many segments of the MCU saying goodbye — and four years having passed since the release of a movie that effectively served as a finale for much of the audience — it's understandable that most of the recent MCU outings have seen smaller box office numbers than their predecessors. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thor: Love and Thunder were successes by most metrics, but not by the MCU's standard of increased returns for each new outing. Wakanda Forever grossed $500 million less than the first Black Panther; Love and Thunder grossed $94 million less than Thor: Ragnarok. And those are the successes. Quantumania, with a budget of $200 million and a gross of $475 million, almost certainly lost money for Marvel.
So, can anything get audiences to turn out in the numbers they did pre-pandemic and pre-Endgame? In this era, it seems like audiences are interested in showing up for characters they love and movies that are really good. That doesn't seem especially complicated, but the first Guardians movie in 2014 was proof that Marvel could make a star out of any hero, no matter how obscure. In the time since, Marvel has made blockbuster movies with Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel. Those are characters that few people, outside of comic fans, were familiar with prior to the MCU, and for a long time, simply being a part of the franchise was enough to get big audiences to turn out.
Post-Endgame, that hasn't been the case. While Spider-Man: No Way Home was a massive hit, it didn't just star Spider-Man — arguably the most popular superhero ever — it starred three generations of Spider-Men. Less popular heroes haven't done so well. Some of that is due to the pandemic, to be sure. It's hard to know how well Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals would have done had they been released in 2019. But, the underperformance of movies starring Ant-Man and Black Panther (plus Black Adam and Shazam, on the other side of the aisle) suggests that audiences aren't there in the same numbers for less seismic super stars.
Which means that Marvel's next movie, The Marvels, may be in trouble for lack of name recognition. Thunderbolts has the same problem. Captain America: New World Order may get audiences in the door with its name, but the absence of the recognizable Chris Evans incarnation of the character in marketing materials may hurt it, too. Blade was a proven box office draw 20 years ago, but who knows how the troubled production will turn out? Deadpool 3 seems like a sure thing, but a lot has changed since the last film's success in 2018, including audience tolerance for quippy humor and the overexposed Ryan Reynolds. It's easy to see the Fantastic Four movie as a guaranteed success, given the popularity of the heroes, but the last movie to star the quartet was a box office bomb.
What about the X-Men? It seems like the sheer excitement of seeing characters like Wolverine and Magneto in the MCU will be enough to get audiences to theaters in huge numbers, but a) there's nothing set in stone about Marvel's eventual X-Men movie, so talking about it at all is speculation, and b) the last X-Men movie (excluding New Mutants which released in the summer of 2020 at the height of COVID) bombed. Fans assume that X-Men and Fantastic Four alone are enough to turn the tide, but their box office track records don't necessarily indicate that.
Of course, there are two Avengers movies on the calendar, and that name alone may get audiences back to theaters. But, when none of the Avengers are the Avengers we love, does the name matter? For me, it's the characters that matter, not the name. Regardless of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's box office fortunes, that was something it offered me: a chance to see characters I love one last time.