Given just how massive the Marvel empire is now, it’s no surprise that Avengers: Age of Ultron is on track to become one of the biggest movies of 2015 (early estimates peg the opening weekend at around $217 million!).
Unless something about that movie goes horribly, horribly wrong, this latest installment will represent just one more notch in Marvel’s incredibly lucrative belt. But just how much money has the studio made on its Cinematic Universe? The answer: a ton.
Phase One
Iron Man was the first MCU movie to be released, and it’s managed to hold its own so far, with a box office tally of around $585.2 million worldwide. That puts it at #7 on a top ten list of the most profitable MCU movies. Among the other releases of Marvel’s first four years, Iron Man 2 was just a hair more profitable than its predecessor, while both Thor and Captain America were less so.
Capping out Phase One’s offerings though is The Avengers, which is still by far the most successful Marvel movie to date. Over the course of its theatrical run, it managed to gross over $1.5 billion (billion!) worldwide.
The least successful? The Incredible Hulk at “just” $263.4 million. No surprise there.
Phase Two
Still fresh off the massive success of The Avengers, Marvel’s Phase Two has experienced an incredible box office return so far. Every single installment has beaten out every movie of Phase One, aside from The Avengers itself.
Iron Man 3 is so far the most successful, with $1.2 billion to date (even cracking the 10 highest grossing movies of all time), while surprise hit Guardians of the Galaxy takes Marvel’s #3 spot with $774.2 million. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Thor: The Dark World were no slouches either, bringing in $714.8 million and $644.8 million respectively.
If Age of Ultron keeps up this trend, and manages to be a bigger version of the original Avengers, we might be looking at Marvel finally cracking the $2 billion mark, something only two films have so far managed to do: Avatar and Titanic (well done James Cameron).
In Total
Overall, if you were asked how much Marvel movies have made so far at the box office, it appears that “a stupid amount of money” would be an acceptable answer.
More specifically though, to date, Marvel movies have made over $7.1 billion worldwide, averaging $716 million per movie. And to clarify, that’s in box office revenue only. The amount those movies have generated in toy/merchandise sales, comic book sales, and licensing deals seems nearly immeasurable.
If you’re interested, here’s the top 10 so far, feel free to weigh in on where you think Age of Ultron and Ant-Man will fall:
1. The Avengers – $1.518 billion
2. Iron Man 3 – $1.215 billion
3. Guardians of the Galaxy – $774.2 million
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier – $714.8
5. Thor: The Dark World – $644.8 million
6. Iron Man 2 – $623.9 million
7. Iron Man – $585.2 million
8. Thor: $449.3 million
9. Captain America: The First Avenger – $370.6 million
10. The Incredible Hulk – $263.4 million
Just the 12 Marvel films released to date have generated over $9 billion in Worldwide sales. That doesn’t included the dozens of Marvel TV series and video games, plus all the merchandising. Marvel has dozens of new films, TV series, and video games planned in the near future. By the time all is said and done, I bet that the Marvel Universe will have generated over $50 billion dollars in revenue including all the past and future films, TV series, video games, and merchandising making it the biggest film and TV entertainment franchise of all time.