No film has ever made $1 billion in the US — Avengers: Doomsday could be the first
The forum that wrote off Avengers: Doomsday as Marvel's next flop now says it will do what Endgame couldn't. For once, the maths is on the hype's side.
Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December 2026, and its advance ticket sales are already being compared with films that were a week from release. One German tracker put it bluntly this week: the film "behaves like a movie which comes out next week", with 63 days still to go. On r/boxoffice, that was enough to start a new argument: three films could cross $1 billion in the US before 2030, and all three are Marvel. Doomsday, Avengers: Secret Wars and the fifth Spider-Man.
The same forum has spent a good while treating Doomsday as the flop that would finally prove superhero fatigue. One of the top replies in the new thread sums up the whiplash: "First people en masse thought Doomsday would be a huge box office flop; now people en masse think Doomsday will make $3 billion in the first 0.2 seconds of its release. Nothing in between."
The ceiling nobody has broken
The US record changed hands only last month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360 million in July, the biggest domestic opening ever, passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its $936.7 million in September, and has since crawled to about $957 million on weekends worth $1.5 million. Avengers: Endgame stopped at $858 million. Ten figures in one country remains untouched.
Brand New Day proved the audience exists. Doomsday has the calendar Spider-Man didn't.
So the best summer Marvel has ever had still fell around $43 million short. That is the case for Doomsday, not against it: the audience turned up in record numbers and simply ran out of summer.
The December maths
Summer blockbusters burn fast. Endgame made about 2.4 times its opening, Brand New Day about 2.7. December films get school holidays, office closures and a January with nothing much else to see: The Force Awakens opened to $248 million and finished on almost four times that. Here is how the forum's best case adds up:
- The opening: commenters float $400 million, which is a hope, not studio tracking. It would beat Brand New Day by $40 million.
- The multiplier: from $400 million, Doomsday needs just 2.5 times its opening, less than Spider-Man managed over the summer.
- The pre-sales: in Germany, a market that rarely gets excited about comic-book films, opening-day sales at T-63 already passed what Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thor: Love and Thunder had on their final day of pre-sales. In the US, TheWrap reported that the first two days of sales ran 65% ahead of Brand New Day.
"Germany is usually never this heavy on pre-sales," one commenter wrote under the tracking post. That's one tracker in one country, to be fair, but it's the right country to be surprised by.
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What could still stop it
The rival is real. Dune: Part Three opens on the same day and wants the same IMAX screens, and so far neither studio has moved. The sceptics have a point too: $400 million still has to happen, and none of Infinity War, Endgame or No Way Home had especially long legs. Open at $320 million and the maths turns ugly quickly.
And it has to be good. The most upvoted comment in the thread puts the whole thing on one condition: "As long as Doomsday is good, $1B is locked because of December legs." That's a cheeky amount of weight on the word "good". If Doomsday falls short, the forum already has its back-up plan: Secret Wars, due on 17 December 2027. Same slot, same studio. Marvel only needs to get there once.
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