Box Office Tracking & Forecasts: THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS ($125-136M+) Eyes One of Marvel’s Best Late Summer Debuts; Early Outlooks for I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and SMURFS

The 36th MCU entry is promising a pivotal, family-centric reboot of a decades-long, fan-favorite ensemble. Meanwhile, late June openers continue to show significant box office promise.

A preview of this report also appears on Box Office Theory’s website.

Yes, we’ve been looking at films six weeks from opening in theaters. Since a pretty major summer title went on sale earlier this week, and another one goes early next week, an executive decision was made to make an exception in today’s report with a seven-week preliminary analysis…

Key Tracking Factors & Rationale:

• The Fantastic Four: First Steps (July 25) began pre-sales earlier this week, marking the next phase of Marvel Studios’ widely anticipated introduction of the ensemble team previously bought to the big screen in two iterations by Fox between 2005 and 2015.

  • Scoring over 200 million views at launch in February, the first full trailer generated one of the best social viewing benchmarks of any recent Marvel film outside Deadpool & Wolverine.

  • Initial pre-sales this week marked the best of any 2025 release across multiple exhibitor samples and Fandango.

  • Fan demand to bring Marvel’s First Family into the MCU has been loud for years in the wake of the franchise’s numerous other successful adaptations of beloved characters, while a retro-futuristic period setting will make effective marketing toward casual viewers challenging to some extent.

  • While some Marvel sentiment has been watered down by excessive volume of content and some word-of-mouth misfires, First Steps is being billed as another return to form (following Thunderbolts* strong reception) for the MCU with the added assumption that it will somehow tease events to come in Avengers: Doomsday, set for a December 2026 release. Whether that excitement translate to similar general audience curiosity will largely be up to marketing over the next seven weeks.