Box office: Thunderbolts* has one of the lowest opening weekends of any summer-launching Marvel movie

Also: Sinners had the one of the best third weekends of any R-rated movie ever, and The King of Kings is the first Bible movie to land in the top ten for four consecutive weeks since 2017.

Thunderbolts assemble? L to R: Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), and Red Guardian (David Harbour) in Thunderbolts*.

It’s a tradition older than the Marvel Cinematic Universe: for most of the past 20 years, the first weekend of the summer movie season has been led by a Marvel superhero flick.

The roots of this tradition go back to the original Spider-Man, which came out the first week of May 2002 and was the first movie ever to gross $100 million in a single weekend. X2: X-Men United got the next summer going with $85.6 million, which at the time was the fourth-biggest opening weekend ever (behind Spider-Man and the first two Harry Potter movies).

Marvel sat things out for the next three years, when the first weekend in May was led by Van Helsing (starring X-Men’s Hugh Jackman), Kingdom of Heaven, and Mission: Impossible III. But the superhero brand came roaring back in 2007, when Spider-Man 3 set a new record by grossing $151.1 million in its own first weekend.

And then a little movie called Iron Man came out in 2008.

For the next decade or so, every single first-weekend-in-May was led by a Marvel movie—usually an MCU movie (Iron Man movies in 2010 and 2013, Thor in 2011, Avengers movies in 2012 and 2015, Captain America: Civil War in 2016, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in 2017), but occasionally a movie from outside of that universe (20th Century Fox’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009, Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014). When the last two Avengers films came out in 2018 and 2019, they were so massively successful that they opened a week early, at the end of April, and they still performed like brand new hits in the first weekend of May.

But then came Covid, and there were no big blockbusters at all at the beginning of May in 2020 or 2021.

Then things got back to normal, with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2023.

And then Marvel took the weekend off again in 2024, thanks in part to delays prompted by the writers’ and actors’ strikes the year before. (The Fall Guy tried to fill the gap, but, not to put too fine a point on it, it didn’t.)

And now, in 2025, the summer movie season is beginning with Thunderbolts*, a sort of Marvel anti-hero team-up that features supporting characters from earlier MCU movies and TV shows but none of that universe’s major heroes.

So, does this film mark another return to normal?

Well, sort of.

Thunderbolts* grossed an estimated $76 million this weekend, which would be pretty decent by most movies’ standards, and the buzz around it seems more positive than not (an A- CinemaScore, a 94% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, etc.).

But it also had the second-lowest opening of any Marvel film at this time of year—ahead of only Thor, which opened to $65.7 million in 2011—and it is, along with Thor, one of only two MCU movies that have opened to less than $100 million in May.

Still, it did about as well as could be expected, given that it has none of the MCU’s A-listers, and given that it’s a new-ish franchise and all of the other MCU non-sequels this decade have opened somewhere in the $70mil-$80mil range.

So, call it a return to the new normal.

Also, while there has been a lot of talk about “superhero fatigue” these past few years and what that fatigue might bode for the movie industry, this particular superhero movie is coming out at a time when original, non-superhero films like A Minecraft Movie and Sinners have been doing (and are still doing) great business.

So there’s no pressure on Thunderbolts* to “save” the movie industry, the way there might have been on other recent Marvel movies. It’s okay for this film to be just one reasonably successful movie among others.

Meanwhile, a few of this week’s other highlights:

• The aforementioned Sinners had the 2nd-best third weekend in wide release of any R-rated movie, behind Deadpool & Wolverine.

• The Accountant 2 had one of the steepest second-week drops of any major Ben Affleck movie outside of the DC universe.

• The King of Kings became the first Bible movie to stay in the top ten for four weeks since 2017’s The Star—and, following The Chosen and The Last Supper (which both opened in March), it marked the eighth straight week in which there was at least one Bible movie in the top ten, a feat unmatched by any film or series of films since The Passion of the Christ spent eight weeks in the top ten back in 2004.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: