Marvel Studios' Thunderbolts* and the Waning of American Cultural Hegemony

Thunderbolts* is a flop.

While my opinion on the film has lowered somewhat since my review, there is a sense that while The Marvels was a giant ass canary in the coal mine of Marvel Studios’ precarious position, Thunderbolts* is the one that confirms a lack of public trust in their output. Relative to their perceived position as the 500-pound gorilla in the film industry, the numbers tell a different story.

But I come here not to bury Thunderbolts*. While Marvel Studios’ state of rapid decay is concerning on its own merits, there’s a different problem here. It feeds into the larger sociopolitical moment and reflects a problem that goes beyond Marvel Studios and bodes poorly for America as the primary cultural force the world over.

That larger problem is not Marvel Studios’ fault. But the MCU’s collapse might be, in part, a symptom.

Box office divination

Box office analysis is a pseudo-science, with the minutiae feeding into some record or another. It’s reading tea leaves of opening hours and percentage drops week-over-week and per-screen averages. Taken in total, box office reflects the health of studios or the film industry itself. If the box office is robust, it means the viewing public has inerest in what these studios are releasing.

What box office is not good for is evaluating a film’s quality. As someone who uses the wild success of the two Avatar movies at the box office as a validator of those film’s quality, the argument isn’t that Avatar is some great film the world over1. There are plenty of movies with ardent fanbases that did horrible in theaters. Fight Club, Blade Runner, and the first Austin Powers movie were all bombs with massive cultural impact on home video and beyond. On the other hand, Jurassic World and The Lion King utterly crushed at the box office despite having weak reputations in the years since their release.

The best application of box office is in evaluating what interests or engages the general public. It reflects what they’ve heard about and what they guess is worth getting off the couch to go out and spend money.

Despite Thunderbolts* still being in theaters and only being about a six weeks into its release cycle, it’s currently tracking to be the second-most unsuccessful Marvel Studios film of all time. It’s crawling towards $400m dollars at the worldwide box office and it probably won’t get there. It’s the weakest Marvel Studios performance since Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, currently just behind Black Widow (which came out just as theaters were re-emerging from COVID hibernation). Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning has already outgrossed it. This is not what Marvel (or Disney) wants, especially from a film with aspirations to be *New Avengers.

International appeal

Starting around 2010, Disney based its film strategy on big swings and bigger hits. It fits within the Disney oeuvre, where Disney has always been a very conservative institution, aiming for four-quadrant appeal to the broadest possible audience. As budgets have grown and the nerds have taken over, this meant films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars with the express purpose of trying to hit a billion dollars at the box office. Not all of them get there, but between Star Wars and Marvel and Pixar there was a big box office domination that meant a consistent confidence in hitting those metrics. Disney built this off of nostalgia and brand recognition, existing properties, sequels, and derivative works. Built-in marketing.

That, however, doesn’t get them all the way there. The way to make up this gap is in incorporating international markets. Marvel, especially, was pulling a lot of their box office from international audiences in Europe and Asia. Disney themselves made specific cuts2 to their movies to ensure they could get past the censors and would actively campaign to get their films in front of a global audience.

(Frankly, it’s not so different from James Cameron’s strategy for the Avatar films, where he needs something like 5% of global population to see those films for them to make financial sense. As such, Cameron constructs his movies for an appeal that is as broad as possible without sacrificing his esoteric interests. No one on the planet has better instincts and that’s the reason why that entire enterprise has succeeded.)

This attempt to appeal globally worked for Marvel Studios because of their relative nascency. The global market got in on Marvel from its birth and they built an investment in these their that feeds into Marvel’s “gotta watch ‘em all” strategy. And yet, for Thunderbolts*, the numbers show that the international market isn’t saving it. That’s bad news for Marvel. At least David Hasselhoff can go to Germany.

The New Number 8

I’m hardly some obsessive box office checker. Sometimes I’ll keep an eye on it if something interesting is happening3, but for the most part the highest grossing films are fairly static. It’s also easy to remember the top ten. They are…

1. Avatar ($2.9b)
2. Avengers: Endgame ($2.8b)
3. Avatar: The Way of Water ($2.3b)
4. Titanic ($2.26b)
5. Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($2.07b)
6. Avengers: Infinity War ($2.05b)
7. Spider-man: No Way Home ($1.9b)
8. Inside Out 2 ($1.7b)
9. Jurassic World ($1.67b)
10. The Lion King (2019) ($1.66b)

Only… that’s a lie, isn’t it? This is the list as it appeared at the beginning of the year. Since then a new film came out and took the #8 spot, shifted Inside Out 2 and Jurassic World down, and kicked The Lion King out of the top ten entirely. When it landed stateside, I was only barely aware of its success. No offense, but I doubt you’re super dialed in on this.

The movie is an animated fantasy called Ne Zha 24. It was made in China where it racked up $1.8b in the Chinese market alone. That’s a huge number, twice the size of the U.S.A.’s top domestic hit5.

All of this to say that out of nowhere, China produced a movie that the Chinese market wanted to see. Considering that China’s population is beyond the scope of what anyone short of the Chinese Communist Party can conceive, by appealing to their native audience, the sheer manpower of the market floated it to incredible placement in the all-time worldwide chart. It’s the sort of success Disney has always wanted but will never have. At the end of the day, American films appeal to American interests just like Chinese films appeal to Chinese interests. Overlap is the Venn of that particular diagram. Such connection is not inherently bad, though it is functionally the same as studio executives greenlighting movies with straight white male leads because they assume that queer/women/of color can’t sell a film because there’s no market for it.

So is Ne Zha 2 a fluke? Or will the inevitable Ne Zha 3 do absolute gangbusters when it comes out in five years? Might the reality of James Cameron as king of the worldwide box office finally come to an end? It’s been almost 30 years he’s been the top dog (excepting the year or so where Avengers: Endgame seized the mantle).

Should we be worried?

Now’s the part that tries to avoid jingoism

As 2025 trudges on and Donald Trump and his clown car of jabronies continue to immolate the federal government, it’s really started to bring out all of the beneficial aspects of our society that we, as Americans, have taken for granted.

One of the invisible benefits of being American is America’s cultural dominance around the world. Patrick Radden Keefe made a terrific podcast about this a couple years ago. Called Wind of Change, Keefe used a silly premise (the CIA wrote the eponymous song that gets credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall) to explore the topic of America’s greatest, undiscussed export: its culture. Keefe tells numerous tales in the series, including how the CIA bankrolled musicians (especially musicians of color) touring around the world to promote American values.

America has had something of a monopoly in specifically film and television. It’s a terrific propoganda for us, not only helping to keep the industry afloat but also as a way of injecting American ideals, beliefs, and and ethos into the bloodstream of other countries. That’s not to say other film industries haven’t done extremely well, producing geniuses in their own right: Japanese cinema has Kurosawa and Miyazaki, South Korea has Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan Wook, Great Britain has Edgar Wright and David Lean, Italy has Federico Fellini and Sergio Leone, and on and on. South Korea has been exporting their dramas and Netflix’s global ubiquity has resulted in easy access to international content. Despite this, no country has been able to match our sheer output, where America’s industry releases multiple films week in and week out. We’ve been doing it for decades.

Now, though, that influence is waning.

One of the byproducts of Trump’s all-out war against the global economy has resulted in a loss of faith in America as a reliable institution. The Trump administration has started to pull down the international radio industry, where America was (very cheaply) funding and providing local news to various international entities via Radio Free Europe and the like. These outlets weren’t partisan, but rather designed to be a reliable source of information and news in countries that didn’t have that (due to economic or political forces). While not explicitly promoting American values, it’s an implicit boon for our country: we provide a service for free and reap the benefits of other countries looking up to us for what we do for them.

This is also true when it comes to American films. The reason why China is so selective about the films it lets into the country is because its authoritarian state attempts to control the culture by carefully monitoring what the populace consumes. It’s a form of control, and for all the (spoilers for the hilarious, actual, real censored ending to Fight Club as it played in China) hilarious censorship films might experience, it doesn’t change the fact that the real power of American films is the allowance for the expression of ideals in ways that might encourage other countries to be more like us. Enlightened citizenry can beget demands for change or more freedoms. We’re far from perfect, but the ethos of freedom and equality is in everything we make. Unapologetically, I’ll say this is a good thing. There are plenty of artists who might make disagreeable material, but everything stems from that sense of “can-do” and a guarantee of freedom that enables such limitless expression.

Seeing Ne Zha 2 hit #8 at the box office is showing that a country like China is going to need us less and less as time goes on. And… good. China should have its own industry that helps the Chinese people see themselves in mass culture. They might begrudgingly allow a handful of films into their market for now, but at their rate of progress they’re going to have a self-sustaining ecosystem that won’t require the import of American films for bread and circus purposes. China (like us) is not a culture that’s going to be content with staying in its own little bubble. China understands (like most people in the world who aren’t in the Trump administration) that globalization and international cooperation is a genie that won’t go back in the bottle. As we have spent the decades since World War II as the main source of cultural conversation, it wouldn’t take much for China (or someone else) to get there at this point. Ne Zha 2 might have made 98% of its box office in China, but that’s simply because it didn’t crossover and capture the imagination of the American populace. It still made $20m in the American market. Next movie might make 95% of its money in China. Eventually, they’ll make something that breaks through to an audience beyond their borders.

Now… I’m all for foreign films. I watch a healtly amount every year. They’re a great vehicle for exposure to other cultures and worldviews. I would love for China to produce a movie that’s on the level of RRR or to have some Rajamouli equivalent emerge, some voice whom I can’t wait to see more of.

But this hegemony we’ve had in place for decades is something we take for granted. Like Marvel, there’s an overwhelming sense that the world will watch something “because we made it”. That might work for a while, but there’s no long-term guarantee. And… I love that I live in a country blessed with this much privilege. I love that we’ve built an economy that can purchase manufactured goods rather than stick poor people (and children) in poor conditions in factories doing menial labor. Our economy is so much more sophisticated than it was at the start of the 20th Century. Our exports are far less tangible than material goods, but that also means they have the potential to be far more powerful. We have so much we can do here that isn’t screwing tiny screws into iPhones. We’re a tremendously rich country. For all that people don’t feel it, how much work there is to be done, and how much the American people should broadly feel and share in that wealth, it’s no less true. It’s a good thing.

However slowly this might erode, losing this is something that should alarm everyone in the United States. America can still make movies and television. We can still (and do) export it everywhere. But the more we piss off allies, the less inclined they’re going to be when we ask them to watch whatever movies our industry is trying to throw out there. The loss of this tentpole decreases America’s global effectiveness and opens the door to others. Like… say China, who can produce films and release them to a global audience. Only those films won’t support democracy or the freedoms that allowed us to make such films in the first place. They’re going to come with the stamp of approval from the Chinese Communist Party and all that entails.

While Trump fucked with us on the world stage during his first administration, his second administration has resulted in a rapid diminishing of our standing in the world stage, Did anyone voting in 2024 vote for an end to American hegemony? Cultural, economic, take your pick. This accelerating decline is a result of that election.

Which brings us back to Thunderbolts*.

Grasping the reins amidst turbulent times

Not every movie is going to break into the top of the box office charts, but it is contingent on artists and their patrons to make work worthy of people’s time and attention. These works don’t need to be overtly political or preachy, but anytime a studio makes a movie they want to do well overseas, it comes with a moral responsibility to represent its country, its values, and its beliefs.

Maybe China coming in and casually making the #8 highest grossing film of all time is the sort of shot in the arm that encourages all of this industry to do better. Maybe it’ll help Marvel realize that “good enough” is not going to cut it. Maybe they’ll realize the cultural freedoms we portray demands the best possible work. James Cameron certainly does. The rest of us have taken all of this paradigm for granted for too long.

There’s plenty of room for every country to have a slice of the overall movie pie, to participate in this global culture. America might be shrinking from a majority dominance to a plurality, whatever that looks like. It will still be okay.

Good stories and great films and astonishing television are all possible. We have a leg up on just about every country that isn’t India. It’s doable. This goes for everything from Marvel to A24 to micro-budget indie projects. But we should know that for the next four years America’s grasp on the cultural reins is going to slip more and more from our hands, especially for as long as Trump is in the White House. We might lose the reins entirely to someone else.

Unless there’s a concerted effort to justify that we’re worthy of being on top, the grace we’ve built around the world as a guarantor of quality export is going to slowly dwindle until it’s gone. And when it’s gone, there’s no guarantee it will ever come back.