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As Xbox CEO Asha Sharma continues to expand the publisher's game worlds into the realm of TV and film, she also has some fighting words for the biggest movie franchise of all time. "Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe."
Xbox's new boss took the reins earlier this year and is now overseeing a reset that could potentially lead to studio shutdowns or layoffs, but one thing she's not scaling back on is the company's mammoth expansion to the big screen. Live-action feature films based on Gears of War and Sea of Thieves are going ahead, as is a sequel to A Minecraft Movie. Amazon Prime is also at work developing a third season of Fallout and a Wolfenstein streaming series.
But Call of Duty is maybe the company's biggest bet, with a new live-action film coming from Taylor Sheridan (Sicario writer and Yellowstone creator) and Peter Borg (Deep Water Horizon) currently set for 2028.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Sharma seemed pretty confident about the project's prospects and Xbox's increasing popularity in Hollywood.
"If you think about it, we've got the number two show of all time on Amazon [Fallout], Minecraft was top five in 2025, Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it all measures. [There's] more appetite to work with us on titles than ever before," she says.
How she's qualifying Call of Duty's bigness compared to the MCU isn't totally clear. Movies in the joint Marvel Cinematic Universe have collectively made over $30 billion across 37 or so installments. While we don't have comparable numbers for the total gross of every Call of Duty game, Sharma's statement is still totally believable.
Call of Duty is almost always the best-selling game of any given year, Activision almost always monetizes them until and after the next one comes out, and the series has two free-to-play cash cows in the form of Call of Duty Warzone and Mobile. Whether that translates into box office success is another question. CoD doesn't have an icon to rely on, like a Super Mario or a Jack Black-shaped Steve, after all.
"You won't see us try to become the biggest linear provider in the world or anything like that, but I think great games are culture, and culture is entertainment," Sharma says.
In the meantime, check out every upcoming video game movie on the horizon.
