The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most thoroughly scored franchise in the WhatSphere catalog: 37 feature films from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain America: Brave New World in 2025. Because the entries share a production house, a marketing engine, and a continuous story, the franchise is an unusually clean lens for one question: did the audience the films were built for change over time? The sphere scores say yes, but not in a straight line.
A reminder on method. Each film carries four relative appeal indices, for Young Men, Young Women, Older Men, and Older Women, normalized so the four average 50. Above 50 is over-indexing, below 50 is under-indexing. We track the two young spheres here because they move the most across the franchise.
The baseline: a young-male franchise
For its first decade the MCU was strikingly consistent. Iron Man read 100 Young Men against 27 Young Women. The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Black Panther, and Avengers: Infinity War all read 100 Young Men with Young Women between 18 and 38. Through Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the franchise rarely deviated: Older Women, the demographic furthest from the core, repeatedly scored at or near 0. The first real narrowing arrived with Captain Marvel in 2019, at 73 Young Men and 56 Young Women.
The 2021 to 2023 widening
Across the next three years the franchise produced its most demographically varied run. Several entries crossed over, scoring higher with Young Women than Young Men for the first time in MCU history.
The films that tilted female
| Film | Year | Young Men | Young Women |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Widow | 2021 | 51 | 78 |
| Eternals | 2021 | 49 | 58 |
| Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness | 2022 | 62 | 71 |
| Black Panther: Wakanda Forever | 2022 | 53 | 62 |
| Thor: Love and Thunder | 2022 | 71 | 62 |
| The Marvels | 2023 | 53 | 93 |
The Marvels is the single most female-skewed entry in the franchise, at 93 Young Women against 53 Young Men. Eternals is the most demographically balanced MCU film ever scored, the only one to land in the mainstream breadth band rather than targeted, reading 49, 58, 42, 51 across the four spheres. It is worth noting that the same window still produced firmly male-skewed entries: Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania both read 100 Young Men. The period is better described as widened variance than as a wholesale pivot.
The partial reversion
The two most recent films in the data move back toward the original baseline. Deadpool and Wolverine in 2024 reads 98 Young Men against 39 Young Women, and Captain America: Brave New World in 2025 reads 98 against 21. Whatever the 2021 to 2023 run represented, it was not a permanent reset. The franchise sampled a broader set of audiences and then returned, for now, closer to where it started.
What the pattern is, and is not
This is a story about the distribution of appeal, not the size of it or the quality of the films. A heavily male-skewed entry can out-gross a balanced one, and a balanced one can be better reviewed; the sphere scores speak to neither. Nor does a single franchise generalize to the industry. The MCU is one production house making deliberate slate decisions, and the cleanest reading of the data is simply that those decisions visibly changed the audience profile for a few years and then changed again.
The value of tracking it this way is that the shift is measurable rather than anecdotal. Instead of arguing about whether the franchise changed, the scores let you point to Black Widow, Eternals, and The Marvels as the entries where the needle actually moved, and to Deadpool and Wolverine as the one where it moved back.
The shift, in two summary numbers
Two counts capture the arc cleanly. First, every one of the franchise most male-skewed entries, the films reading 100 Young Men with Young Women under 40, was released before 2021. Second, every MCU film in which Young Women outscored Young Men, six in total, falls in the 2021 to 2023 window: Black Widow, Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love and Thunder, and The Marvels. The entire female-leaning history of the franchise is those three years. Outside them, the MCU has never once tilted female.
There is a quieter pattern underneath the young-audience story: Older Women were the franchise persistent blind spot. Through the first decade that sphere repeatedly scored at or near 0, the lowest of the four in nearly every entry. The films that finally lifted it are the same ones that widened the franchise overall, with Eternals reaching 51 and Wakanda Forever 47. When the recent films reverted toward the young-male baseline, Older Women fell back with them. That single sphere, more than any other, tracks whether a given MCU film was reaching beyond its founding audience or returning to it.
