Marvel Studios has had some outstanding weekends in its history, but not since the paradigm-shifting debut of 2012’s “The Avengers” has a weekend been more consequential for the company than the most recent one. On Saturday night, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige opened the company’s presentation at San Diego Comic-Con by announcing that “Deadpool & Wolverine” would have the highest opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie, and that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had just passed more than $30 billion in global box office grosses, the first film franchise ever to reach that milestone by a wide margin. Roughly an hour later, Feige closed the panel with the announcement that Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed the two most recent “Avengers” movies to more than $4.
8 billion in worldwide grosses, were returning to the company to direct the next two “Avengers” movies — and that Robert Downey Jr. was also coming back to star in them as Dr. Victor von Doom.
In between, Feige presided over presentations of its 2025 film slate, which featured a first look at Harrison Ford as the Red Hulk and the debut of Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic 4. It was by any measure an impressive exhibition of Marvel’s singular ability to transform fan enthusiasm into a sense of gleeful inevitability, that slightly lightheaded feeling that of course the studio’s movies will be gargantuan, crowd-pleasing, inescapable cultural phenomenons. Going into this weekend, however, that.