Xbox CEO says Call of Duty is bigger than the MCU

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma used an Entertainment Weekly interview to argue that Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the comparison says as much about Microsoft’s strategy as it does about the shooter itself. The point landed inside a broader Xbox push into film and television, where Todd Howard is taking Fallout onto screen, Matt Booty is talking up the coming Gears of War movie, and Infinity Ward’s Mark Grigsby has sounded upbeat about the Call of Duty movie in development.

Microsoft has spent 2026 presenting Xbox as a mass entertainment platform, not just a console business. On February 20, 2026, the company said Xbox had passed 500 million monthly active users across its ecosystem and named Sharma as EVP and CEO of Microsoft Gaming the same day. That matters because the MCU comparison is not coming from a company thinking small. Box Office Mojo lists the Marvel Cinematic Universe at $13,104,471,816 in U.S. and Canada box office across 44 releases, while Avengers: Endgame alone pulled in $2,799,439,100 worldwide. On raw movie revenue, the MCU still towers over anything in games. Sharma’s claim makes more sense as a cultural-scale argument, not a spreadsheet comparison.

Microsoft’s own screen push gives that reading more weight. A Minecraft Movie, built from Mojang Studios’ game and released by Warner Bros., finished 2025 as the top domestic movie of the year with about $424 million in North American box office. That gives Xbox a clean proof point that its biggest brands can travel beyond games and still move real money. The same logic now appears to be shaping how Microsoft talks about Call of Duty: not as a one-release-at-a-time shooter, but as a franchise with enough reach to anchor films, shows, and a broader business around it.

The practical fallout shows up in platform choices. Infinity Ward co-heads Mark Grigsby and Jack O’Hara recently teased a new Call of Duty title in the 2026 lineup, and Insider Gaming reported that the game would not launch on last-gen consoles and would not be day-one Game Pass content. That is the kind of decision that only makes sense if Microsoft believes the franchise has enough pull to justify tighter control over where and how it lands. Call of Duty does not need to beat Avengers: Endgame on the weekend tally to matter here. It needs to keep acting like the kind of property that can force Xbox to think bigger about hardware, subscriptions, and what a flagship franchise is supposed to do.