2019 Superhero Movies: Which Title Won the Battle of the Box Office?

Another year comes to a close and with it another end to the annual Box Office Battle. 2019 saw a lot of superhero movies. Whether or not you consider them cinema, they brought in billions of dollars from worldwide audiences, with only four movies tallying up for more than $6 billion on their own. So to folks who thought the Superhero Craze was slowing down, yeah, that's probably not happening anytime soon.

However, you might think that the year's biggest movie, both at the box office and in the zeitgeist, was Disney/Marvel's MCU culmination, Avengers: Endgame... and you'd pretty much be correct. BUT! It wasn't a clean sweep from the ultimate Marvel movie; a late-year spoiler lurked in the wings to snag the top spot in one of our categories. Avengers: Infinity War had a great shot at sweeping last year, but a DC hero and a fellow Marvel movie prevented that. So who gets to play the spoiler this year? Read on to find out!

brightburn-image-2 — Image via The H Collective

A note on which movies were included and how the totals were tallied: Basically we confined the entries to the biggest superhero movies of the year; sorry to Fast Color (4/19) and Brightburn (5/24). That doesn't mean only Marvel and DC Comics were considered, though. Here's a look at the ones that made the cut:

So while the ultimate winner of the 2019 Battle of the Superhero Box Office shouldn't come as a surprise, this list serves as a good reminder of the many superhero movies that premiered, just how well (or poorly) they performed, and how blessed we are to be seeing superheroes and supervillains of this quality on the big screen. See how your favorite fared below!

Best Opening Day (Domestic)

Avengers: Endgame - $157.5 million
Captain Marvel - $61.7 million
Joker - $39.4 million
Spider-Man: Far From Home - $39.3 million
Shazam! - $20.4 million
Glass - $15.9 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $14.0 million
Hellboy - $4.9 million

Best Opening Weekend (Domestic)

Avengers: Endgame - $357.1 million
Captain Marvel - $153.4 million
Joker - $96.2 million
Spider-Man: Far From Home - $92.6 million
Shazam! - $53.5 million
Glass - $40.3 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $32.8 million
Hellboy - $12.0 million

Best Opening Weekend (International)

Avengers: Endgame - $866.5 million
Captain Marvel - $302.4 million
Joker - $140.5 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $103.7 million
Shazam! - $102.0 million
Glass - $48.5 million

*Quick note: With Box Office Mojo's disastrous redesign, it's become a lot harder to find reliable box office numbers for specific categories. For example, Hellboy international box office figures are nearly impossible to track down, and Spider-Man: Far From Home's somewhat wonky international release (getting a boosted $111 million from China, Hong Kong, and Japan early on) led to "inflated" numbers since they covered 10 days rather than a three-day weekend:

Spider-Man: Far From Home - $395 million (10 days)*
Hellboy - N/A

Best Opening Weekend (Worldwide)

Avengers: Endgame - $1.2 billion
Captain Marvel - $456.7 million
Joker - $234 million
Shazam! - $158.6 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $136.5 million
Glass - $89,100,000

*See my note above:

Spider-Man: Far From Home - $580 million (10 days)*
Hellboy - N/A

Best Overall Box Office to Date (Domestic)

Avengers: Endgame - $858.4 million
Captain Marvel - $426.8 million
Spider-Man: Far From Home - $390.5 million
Joker - $333.5 million
Shazam! - $140.4 million
Glass - $111.0 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $65.8 million
Hellboy - $21.9 million

Best Overall Box Office (International)

Avengers: Endgame - $1.939 billion
Spider-Man: Far From Home - $741.4 million
Joker - $730.0 million
Captain Marvel - $701.4 million
Shazam! - $224.2 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $186.6 million
Glass - $136.0 million
Hellboy - $22.8 million

Best Overall Box Office (Worldwide)

avengers-endgame-ladies — Image via Marvel Studios

First up, here's the billion-dollar-(plus)-club:

Avengers: Endgame - $2.798 billion
Spider-Man: Far From Home - $1.132 billion
Captain Marvel - $1.128 billion
Joker - $1.063 billion

And here's the crew who came up short with "only" tens or hundreds of millions of dollars:

Shazam! - $364.6 million
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - $252.4 million
Glass - $147.0 million
Hellboy - $44.7 million

Best Audience Retention

This is a measure of how well a movie title retained its audience after opening weekend. Normally the number is reported as a percentage of the audience that's lost rather than retained since movies very rarely pick up a bigger audience in its second week. However, for simplicity's sake, we went with retention %, because bigger is better:

Joker – 58.1%
Spider-Man: Far From Home – 49%
Glass - 46.8%
Shazam! - 45.7%
Captain Marvel – 44.3%
Avengers: Endgame - 41.3%
Hellboy - 32.8%
X-Men: Dark Phoenix - 28.5%

Great job, Joker! I never would have guessed in a million years that Joker had a better audience retention than Avengers: Endgame, but here it is. Perhaps a combination of the massive first-weekend audiences for A:E vs the positive buzz and word-of-mouth for Joker after early screenings and its successful opening weekend had a positive impact on audience turnout. Either way, it's clear audiences were happy seeing the marathon-like Marvel movie once. (And hey, at least Hellboy didn't come in last this time!)

And the Winner Is ...

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Avengers: Endgame, obviously.

But while Marvel's MCU-topper easily won the majority of the categories of the 2019 Box Office Battle, it wasn't a clean sweep. Joker stepped in to deliver a category-best audience-retention rate. Solid work, Arthur Fleck!

Now that 10 years' worth of the MCU has been concluded (before the next phase begins, anyway), one wonders if the superhero cinema landscape will open up a bit. Disney/Marvel will surely still be a powerhouse, but WB/DC and Sony's Spidey-verse isn't going anywhere, and there's still room for more indie pictures. Will 2020 be even bigger?

Probably not; but here's a look at the superhero movies we're in for: