When I was growing up in the '80s, superhero films were in short supply. For most of the decade, there were really only a handful of Superman films of decreasing quality. There were science-fiction films, of course, and larger-than-life adventure movies with heroes that skirted the edge of "super", but little else that would technically qualify. Fans of superheroes had to look to reruns of older cartoons if they wanted to see their favorite characters outside of the comics. That changed when Tim Burton's Batman burst onto the big screen in 1989, creating what can be viewed as the first summer blockbuster from a marketing bonanza standpoint, and catapulting the Caped Crusader back into the public conscience. It seems strange to think now, given how ubiquitous Batman has become, to think that up until that summer, his pop culture presence really sprang only from cable channel repeats of the '60s TV series or Superfriends.
It's hard to overstate how huge the 1989 film was. Not only did it transform Batman (and the Joker) back into topics of everyday conversation, but it was an Oscar-winning, quotable, and instantly recognizable icon. And suddenly, just like that, Batman was cool again. Over the next decade, he stood alone as the only superhero able to maintain a silver screen presence, though again, the various films' qualities were...shall we say, debatable? At any rate, eventually the coolness factor was overshadowed by things like Bat-nipples and stunt casting.
Unfortunately, there was little else to speak of in that genre, much of which is better left forgotten. Outside of Blade - a comparatively minor hero - coming out in 1998, characters from the Big Two - DC & Marvel - were in short supply in Hollywood. That's not to say there was no presence at all for superheroics - animated versions of many heroes appeared on TV screens regularly throughout the '90s. Batman: the Animated Series won multiple Emmys and proved to be a hugely influential concept, and led to subsequent series featuring Superman, and later, the entire Justice League. Marvel had a plethora of series as well, from the higher-quality, such as X-Men, to the less well-received, such as Iron Man. So the characters found a life outside of the comics, but very little of them found their way to movie theaters.
But all of that started to change in the summer of 2000....
When X-Men hit the big screen, it was the first major motion pictue - and by major, I refer to "major" by Hollywood summer measurements - certainly enough to spawn a franchise which is still turning out films today, some fifteen years later. It was Marvel's first major feature, and it ended the drought of superhero films. From this point on, just about every summer would see at least one of the garish cape and longjohns crowd gracing the cinema.
The thing about X-Men was, though - it was cool. Yes, by modern standards it was sedate, and then, as now, every aspect of the film, from the costume design to the music to Famke Janssen's hair color, were subject to copious amounts of fan analysis, debate, and spittle. But there was something magnificent and revelatory about seeing these characters come to life on the big screen. While animation provided liberties live-action could not yet achieve, seeing favorite heroes and villains as flesh-and-blood people, and backed by promotions and merchandising, was a remarkable experience for comic fans, and one long thought impossible.
And then suddenly, we'd gone from famine to feast, in the span of a decade and a half, and what was once barely imaginable is now commonplace. So what happened? Well, box office receipts are the bottom line, but I remain convinced that 9/11 also played a part in the growth of the superhero genre. I think there was a great deal of fear and uncertainty in the world, much more so than usual in those days, and Hollywood was an unwitting beneficiary. Specifically, the first Harry Potter movie, and the first Lord of the Rings movie, came out shortly after the attacks, and my read is that people were drawn to movies about good and evil, heroes and villains, redefining a sense of right and wrong in a really dark time. The first Spider-Man movie debuted the following summer, and it seems that the die was cast, as studios realized larger-than-life characters were welcomed - and were eminently marketable- in the new millennium.
One by one, we saw the characters of our beloved fandoms coming to life - either for the first time, or brought back after lengthy absences. (The long-awaited Star Wars prequels had begun in 1999, but they kind of go into their own category, by my reckoning.) By virtue of having farmed out many of their properties during a period of financial distress in the '90s, Marvel had multiple studios working on putting out their films, whereas DC, working via their parent company Warner Bros., only processed one project at a time. Eventually, however, both companies began working out cohesive strategies for what became known as "Cinematic Universes" - multiple films and multiple franchises connecting into each other to form a fully integrated 'world', very akin to how the comics themselves operate. Marvel's take on this has been more fully fleshed out, now in it's eighth year, whereas DC, after the phenomenal but stand-alone success of the Dark Knight trilogy, stumbled a few times before finally getting their act together. (Only one film in the DCCU has been released so far, with the next two due next year.) Marvel's also got their universe spread across both movies and television, although DC has done very well for itself in the television department, with at least one major superhero series on TV going back to 2001. This year, they have four, with a possibility of three additional new series across different networks in the fall, some of which are in a shared reality.
With each new entry, fans were treated to something new, at least at first. Each movie brought new characters, locations, and plots to life, some more successfully than others. There was an excitement to it..."We finally get to see so-and-so", and as more and more of these things happened, fans began to imagine what could come next. What was once inconceivable was now just the horizon.
But here's where things go a little south for me. At some point - I'm not sure exactly when - I started to feel a little bit...well, bloated. I think it might have begun around the time that superhero franchises that were new a decade ago suddenly had to start being 'rebooted', retreading the same ground in a slightly different way. Maybe it was the point where you had to watch a weekly TV series to be clued into a movie, or vice versa. Or maybe it was the point when, at the major fan conventions like SDCC or NYCC, when I started to find myself not looking forward to one big thing in particular, but to find that my attention was being vied for by multiple different projects, sometimes by the same studio. And all at once, it was hard to really work up an appetite for anything, because I never had time to get hungry.
A very rough estimate, counting movies released or about to be released in the next year, from 2000 forwards, gives me a count of 14 Marvel Studios movies, 24 additional Marvel movies released through other studios, 10 DC movies, and a smattering of other independent heroes. This is only counting live-action theatrical releases, not animated features or live action television shows, and I may be missing a few. This is, of course, not taking into account 6 Lord of the Rings films, 8 Harry Potter films, plus things like Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, Indiana Jones, etc.
So just using that very rough total gives me 48 superhero movies in fifteen years - an average of just over three a year. Realize, though, that that average is skewed much more towards recent years than the early part of the 2000s. Next year, if I remember aright, we have six (?) superhero films due. We're a far cry from a once-every-several-years event movie. If you had told me in my adolescence that some day, I'd be able to see characters like Kilowog, the Warriors Three, or Rocket Raccoon (!) on the big screen, I wouldn't have believed you. Now, they have movie-edition action figures.
On the one hand, that's great - "everybody gets a share", to coin a phrase, and there's always something new on the horizon. On the other hand - ay-yi-yi.
Now, I'll grant you I have a certain amount of compulsion to see these films. Part of that is an honest desire to see (most of) them, but part of it is feeling like I'm going to miss out on something, or feel like a bad fan, or something. Obviously, it'd be easy to say 'just ignore them', etc., and perhaps that's something I need to work harder at, if it's becoming this much of an information overload. There's also still an amount of old-fashioned ingrained enthusiasm at work here, but that gets harder and harder to maintain, especially when you start to realize that not every movie is worth getting worked up about. (And by the way, I should point out that if you're reading this and don't understand how anyone can get worked up about movies, you clearly don't know much about how fandom works.)
Of the four-dozen-ish movies I've seen, I've loved maybe six or seven of them. I've hated about the same amount. Quite a few of them have been disappointing, to say the least, or plagued with some kind of critical problem. With the DC films, because of their comparatively lesser frequency, it feels like there's more riding on each one, so bad decisions feel like they carry greater weight on the movies. With Marvel, they're churning things out so fast, and trying to make everything 'fit', that it feels like they're producing quite a few obligatory, unremarkable chunks of fluff. (Also, I cannot shake the mental image of a distorted Scrooge McDuck rolling in his money pit, cackling wildly about the revenues pouring in from a submissive public thanks to his new toys.) In online circles, it also doesn't help when fans of one company form a human e-barricade, promoting 'their' companies' output while deriding the other, regardless of respective quality. Though to be fair, this is a simply an extrapolation of the way comics fandoms have gone on for fifty years.
What's good is often great, and what's not is often lucky to be called mediocre - and yet, it keeps coming. Worse yet, the source material has suffered, trying to maintain interest among longtime fans but playing to the new arrivals as well, brought in from seeing one of the adaptations. This has led to the comics becoming, in many ways, unreadable, and alienating large chunks of their fan communities. DC voluntarily self-imploded in 2011, with the result that their universe has become an ungodly mess. Marvel, not one to be outdone, seems bent on a similar course for the near future.
All in all, it leaves me a little overwhelmed, and as a result, somewhat disinterested and slightly depressed. I keep plugging away - I've recently finished the Netflix Daredevil series, and Avengers 2 opens next week in the U.S., both of which are likely subjects for future blogs if I can keep this going. I'm always eager to watch The Flash on Tuesdays, but my DVR is getting overloaded with a backlog of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., because I haven't worked up the mental energy to suffer through it. The first trailer for Batman v Superman hit the 'net last week, but even that - Batman, of all things - has left me feeling a bit exasperated.
I'm sure I'll feel better about a lot of these things eventually, but for now, I'm facing a bit of online ennui from listening to the discussions about All The Things. One day, I may finally learn to stop reading the comments, but for now, a lot of it is simply hoping for the best. But when I think about the level of excitement and engagement that used to accompany these movies, when they were more infrequent and yet every bit an 'event', I find I kind of miss that. As strange as it feels to say, maybe in this case less is more.
At the very least, though - I still have the DVDs of the ones who came before, and many of them never lose their charm. And some of them can still make me feel like a wide-eyed kid opening up a new comic for the first time. It's for hope of more of those moments that I continue to keep up interest, because every so often, they happen. And when they do, they never go away.
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