It seemed like Thunderbolts may have been able to crawl to get a few more places up the MCU’s all-time earners list, but it has now been crushed by two huge new movies, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and the live-action Lilo and Stitch remake.

Now, Thunderbolts’ global earnings are about to end entirely as the movie leaves theaters (very quickly), as soon as this Thursday in many places, meaning it won’t even have another weekend to increase its totals.

As it stands, Thunderbolts has earned $355 million globally. That makes it the second= worst-earning MCU film ever, depending on if you count the pre-Iron Man Incredible Hulk (I do not). Here is the list:

One issue here is a rather bad split between international and US audiences, about 50/50 when other films earn more abroad. Though this also just happened with Captain America: Brave New World. If Thunderbolts got $20-25 million more it could have passed the first Captain America and Black Widow, but it’s just not going to happen.

This list also demonstrates just how much of an absurd failure The Marvels was, well below everything else by a mile, but that’s something to re-litigate for another day. But yeah, we may not be seeing Carol again any time soon.

What happened here? The movie was really good, right? Yes, it was, and Marvel even said outright that it wanted to hold up Thunderbolts as a new quality paragon for the MCU going forward.

The problem is that these are simply not well-known characters at all, and someone like Florence Pugh can only carry things so far. Yes, Bucky has been in a ton of MCU movies, but always as a supporting character, as he is here. Three characters were from Black Widow, which as you can see, also did not do great. One is from a Disney Plus show many people will not have watched. Another is from the second Ant-Man movie from seven years ago.

No matter if the film was good (and it is!), this was never going to be a big draw. It also had a very bad marketing campaign in that right after the film came out they ripped the name off the movie and started calling it The New Avengers, which is the big reveal at the end of the film and it was probably one of the worst marketing calls I’ve ever seen. That may have affected future weekends, but probably not enough to be relevant, to be honest.

I know “Marvel Fatigue” is thrown around a lot, but this was just sort of a perfect storm of badness. Deadpool and Wolverine just made a billion dollars. The Fantastic Four will do well. The next Spider-Man will do well. The next Avengers movies will do well. But this just did not have a chance, and I’d say something about the Sam Wilson-led Brave New World as well.

The Thunderbolts budget was “only” $150 million, but add in marketing and distribution and such and I mean, again, it’s the second worst-performing MCU movie ever. This is not a win on anything but the quality side. Which is great for audiences, but it means we may see fewer films like this in the future, unfortunately. I also wonder if their stated roles in the upcoming Avengers Doomsday may now be at risk.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.