Superhero films: Is this the end of the road?
Marvel / DisneyA combination of grim headlines and poor box office numbers means that the colossal success of the superhero franchises could be a thing of the past, writes Nicholas Barber.
Superhero films aren't looking too super. Jonathan Majors, the American actor, was arrested last weekend and has since been charged with assault, and although his representatives have declared that he is innocent, the US Army has temporarily shelved the recruitment adverts in which he appeared. That puts the Disney-owned Marvel Studios in an awkward position. Majors plays Kang the Conqueror, who wasn't just the villain in the recent Ant-Man film, but is meant to be the main baddie in the next wave of Marvel blockbusters. Should he keep the role? And what about Ezra Miller? They were charged with a series of crimes occurring last spring and summer, but have the title role in DC's The Flash, which is due out in June. Are viewers supposed to forget about the grim headlines and pretend that everything is fine?
Obviously there are more important things to consider than box office takings regarding these allegations, and the two actors' alleged behaviour has nothing to do with the films they're in or the studios that make them, but they do deepen the impression that superhero cinema is not what it was – that some kind of Kryptonite is sapping the strength of a genre that once seemed unstoppable and indestructible. So far, this year's two superhero releases, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, have both underperformed at the box office and received grudging reviews (47% and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively). Nor did this decline and fall start with them. An article published by Screen Rant on 1 January was headlined, "2022 Was the Year Superhero Movies Lost Their Box Office Dominance". It was the year when DC's Black Adam bombed, despite starring Hollywood's highest earner, Dwayne Johnson, and the year when Sony's Morbius became a social-media joke, bombarded by mocking memes and going on to "win" two Golden Raspberry awards. If you compare them with the year's two biggest hits, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, they look like scrappy, derivative B-movies rather than the mighty tentpoles we have come to expect.
Warner Bros and DC ComicsWhat went wrong? Well to answer that question, it helps to remember what went right. Superhero films had been hits before, but they became a phenomenon in 2008, when The Dark Knight topped the annual box office chart, and Iron Man was in second place. Despite that ranking, it was Iron Man that was the game-changer because it launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Under the sharp eye of Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios' president, the company kept introducing fresh, fun, charismatic new versions of classic Marvel comics characters, such as Thor and Captain America. One by one, these characters crossed over into each other's films, so that each individual mega-budget spectacular also functioned as an episode in an ever-growing epic. Audiences were hooked.
Seeing this success, other Hollywood studios realised that they still held the rights to a handful of other characters from Marvel comics – and that it was time to get those characters back on the screen. Twentieth Century Fox revived its X-Men franchise, and tried to revive the Fantastic Four. Sony rebooted Spider-Man just a few years after Tobey Maguire had hung up his red-and-blue spandex suit. Meanwhile, Warner Bros had the rights to the characters published by Marvel's rivals, DC Comics, so they set about establishing their own shared universe, featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Cinemas were packed with superheroes.
Perhaps the genre was over-valued because Marvel was doing so well. Even during the gold rush years of the 2010s, there were plenty of superhero films, such as Fantastic Four and Green Lantern (anyone remember that?), which took commercial and / or critical drubbings. But in general, comic-book blockbusters seemed to be soaring to ever greater heights of popularity, peaking with the starbursts of Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). These films brought all of the MCU's many characters together, concluded its decade-long overarching narrative, snuffed out and restored half of the universe's population, and wrote out two fan favourites, Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man and Chris Evans' Captain America. They made billions of dollars – but how could the company possibly follow them? No one at Marvel seemed to know.
Running out of steam
One factor is that the Covid-19 pandemic slowed momentum, closing cinemas a year after Avengers: Endgame was released. (And how could any made-up global threat compete with that real one?) But another factor is that the next MCU films, those in its so-called "Phase Four", were enervated and purposeless: the hangover after the wild party the night before. With the wrapping up of the company's cosmic "Infinity Saga", and the retirement of its most glamorous stars, the formulaic, familiar nature of its films became all too obvious.
Black Widow (2021) was essentially one long flashback, focusing on a character who had been killed off in Avengers: Endgame. The dreary Eternals (2021) proved that Chloé Zhao, fresh from her Oscar win for a low-key documentary-style drama, Nomadland, probably shouldn't direct effects-heavy blockbusters. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) was an inferior rehash of Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) had to make do without its titular hero, following the death of the man who played him, Chadwick Boseman. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) innovated by incorporating so much Chinese culture, but it still followed a template that had been used too many times. A sequel is reportedly "in development", but no release date has been announced.
Warner BrosThe MCU had been revolutionary because, up until Avengers: Endgame, you had to see every film in it to fully appreciate all of the others. But now you could skip them without missing anything in particular. In fact, the films felt less important than WandaVision, Loki, and the rest of the Marvel television series on Disney+. And if the most interesting superhero action is on TV, why bother paying to see its poor relation at the cinema?
Not that this was just a Marvel problem. Every superhero franchise is now weighed down with the baggage of earlier films, so a genre that used to be about the exhilarating thrill of forward motion is no longer going anywhere fast. For the viewer, it's getting difficult to remember who is in the Avengers, who is playing the Joker, whether Wolverine is alive or dead, and whether Venom is in Sony's Spider-Man Universe or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or some other universe altogether. Superhero films now seem to have more of a past than a future. They're exhausted, and so are their viewers.
AlamyOne issue is that the studios are simply running out of beloved characters. It's true that several actors have played Spider-Man over the last two decades, but Iron Man and Captain America are so closely associated with Downey and Evans, the actors who made the parts their own, that it wouldn't work to recast them now. So who are we left with? Marvel Studios is reaching the bottom of the barrel with The Marvels and Thunderbolts, while Sony is planning films around such Spider-Man B-listers as Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web. Maybe Marvel and DC comics weren't the infinite resource they once promised to be, after all.
Still, we shouldn't get carried away. Last year, there were four superhero films in the worldwide box-office top 10 – five if you include Minions: The Rise of Gru. Spider-Man: No Way Home was the highest grossing film of 2021. And I, for one, am looking forward to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in June. Beyond that, James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, has been given the job of relaunching DC's superheroes with new actors and a new approach. The genre could still make a triumphant comeback, as the characters in its stories so often do. But will it ever again engender the excitement that those first Marvel films did? That really would be a superhuman feat. Believe it or not, the term "superhero fatigue" was already being bandied around back in 2011. In 2023, cinemagoers everywhere know how it feels.
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