Captain Marvel box office: Marvel’s first woman superhero movie has made $1 billion

Captain Marvel standing in a scrub-covered desert with hills in the background.

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in Captain Marvel.

Marvel Studios

Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

Captain Marvel is now Marvel’s $1 billion woman.

In its three-and-a-half weeks or so in theaters, Captain Marvel has hauled in $358 million domestically and $645 million internationally to bring its worldwide total a little over the $1 billion mark, according to Variety. The movie is now Marvel’s eighth (out of 21) most successful movie on North American soil, and overall, it has Marvel’s seventh-biggest box office of all time.

Captain Marvel is Marvel’s first movie — in 11 years of filmmaking and 20 movies — to center on a female superhero. And with that comes the pressure to succeed. If it had failed, Captain Marvel could have been used as an excuse to not make woman-led superhero movies, under the logic that those movies don’t make money.

Money dictates what kind of movies Marvel makes or doesn’t continue making. It’s an unfortunate reality that in the past, poorly received female superhero movies like 2004’s Catwoman and 2005’s Elektra have been cited as reasons not to make more superhero movies centered on woman characters.

Captain Marvel’s box office success also comes in the face of online trolls who tried to sink the movie’s online audience scores with fake reviews and low ratings on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. The movie has been met with mostly positive reviews from critics.

The question now isn’t if, but rather when Marvel will officially announce a sequel to their $1 billion-dollar hit. So far the company has been quiet about its release slate post-Avengers: Endgame, understandably as not to detract from the attention or further spoil next month’s huge release — announcing a Captain Marvel sequel before Endgame would lightly spoil that Carol Danvers survives going up against Thanos in that movie (which is her next appearance in the MCU). But it’d be a safe bet that Danvers, given the billion-dollar success of her first film, will continue to be one of the faces of Marvel for years to come.

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