The latest Spider-Man film, Brand New Day, has just passed $2.4bn at the global box office, to become the third-highest grossing film of all time behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. Meanwhile Avengers: Doomsday is reported to have already earned more than $50m in US ticket presales alone, despite the fact that it doesn’t come out until December. Clearly we are in the middle of a superhero renaissance.
And yet it doesn’t really feel like it, largely because it is something of a turnaround for Marvel, after a pretty disappointing 2025 in which all three of the studio’s releases underperformed. Captain America: Brave New World took $415m worldwide, Thunderbolts* managed $382m and even the well-reviewed The Fantastic Four: First Steps stalled at $521m, against a reported $200m budget. These are hardly Madame Web numbers but they do suggest there is still a problem about what to do with all those superheroes who cannot sustain a $300m multiversal extravaganza.
Enter Sebastian Stan, AKA Marvel’s Winter Soldier, who this week suggested the solution might be to place them in cheaper genre films instead. Speaking to New York Magazine, the actor revealed that he had pitched Marvel boss Kevin Feige a new, “Sicario-esque”” approach for Bucky Barnes’ next adventure. He goes on a whole journey to try to figure out who this person is.
It’s a thriller.” In any other period, this might feel like just another example of an actor trying to do his producer’s job for him. But Stan is on something of a career high, having earned his first Oscar nomination for The Apprentice and won a Golden Globe for A Different Man. And the idea of dropping the Winter Soldier into a murky, Sicario-style conspiracy thriller almost feels custom-designed to offset superhero fatigue.
Stan was perfectly fine in last year’s Thunderbolts*, but the reality is that he could easily have been replaced by Shang-Chi, Ms Marvel or one of the Eternals without anyone really noticing. Marvel hasn’t really known what to do with the Winter Soldier since the Wakandans removed his Hydra programming somewhere between Civil War and Infinity War. We know he’ll be in Doomsday but do we really need him making up the numbers while the better-known Avengers prevent reality from collapsing all over again?
Wouldn’t it be better to put him in a grimy $50m thriller in which the fate of one damaged man’s mind matters more than the continued existence of the entire spacetime continuum? This could end up being a whole new thing. Give Ghost a stripped-back heist movie in which her ability to walk through walls is used to break into an actual building.
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