With a new Ant Man film just released, another Guardians of the Galaxy movie looming and gawd knows what other MCU phase 5 slugfests coming down the Disney pipe hole, we decided to take a wide data snapshot of all 30 previous movies. See if we can answer the question:

What is the best performing Marvel Movie?

It all depends on how you measure performance, of course.

Critical success? Audience score? Worldwide gross revenue? Domestic US revenue? Percent of budget recovered? Percent of budget recovered in the opening weekend? Opening weekend revenue? *Second* weekend revenue? (a decent barometer of audience response).

Many, many metrics. But don’t worry. We’ve stuffed them all into this interactive scatterplot so you can easily explore for yourself.

» See the data
» Made with VizSweet

Some interesting metrics & combos

% budget recovered – a blockbuster movie typically needs to recoup 250% of its budget to cover worldwide marketing costs. So this metric let you quickly see which MCU movies have been commercial flops.

1st vs 2nd weekend drop off – high % declines between weekends is suggestive of audiences not particularly liking a movie, not recommending it to friends etc. Use this to see which movies came in ‘below average’

% budget recovered vs % critics score – any correlation between critical appreciation and box office success?

audience vs critics % deviance – shows which films were more (or less) favoured by audiences vs. critics. You can clearly see the results of organised review bombing here.

» Made with our dataviz software VizSweet