Marvel Cinematic Universe

Marvel's Avengers: Endgame was released two weeks back, 26 April 2019, and it instantly broke several box office records. In this post, I visualize the box office performance of all twenty-two movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe using the data sourced from Wikipedia. Marvel spent approximately $4.58 Billion to make twenty-two movies and raked up a lofty $20.45 Billion in revenue.

IRON MAN was the first MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movie that jump-started the multi-billion dollar franchise, leading up to the end of Phase I with Avengers: Endgame. In every plot, the bubbles are color coded by their groups (i.e mini-series) and their size indicate the Worldwide gross earnings.

While the Avengers movies generate a lot of press, they may not necessarily be the best performing series in terms of return on investment. This is not evident if we just look at the box office earnings.

CAPTAIN MARVEL is by far the most profitable movie of the franchise, made with a budget shy of 100 Million, it grossed over $ 1 Billion Worldwide. Among the Avengers series, the first installment performed the best though Iron Man 3 and Black Panther provided better returns.

Avengers: Endgame will need to gross over $ 4 Billion in order to become the most profitable along with the highest grossing movie ever.

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Update Jul 2019: The wikipedia page now shows the production budget of CAPTAIN MARVEL as $150 mil which is different from the $97.8 mil shown during the 1st week of May 2019. Nonetheless, CAPTAIN MARVEL remained the best performing movie until recently when Avengers: Endgame finally eclipsed it. The updated plot below shows the budget (x-axis), return (y-axis) and box office gross (bubble size) in a single plot.

Thats it, Folks.