“Ferrari” director Michael Mann is right: “People are tired of all the superhero movies.” It remains to be seen whether his judgment is correct that they are now longing for suspense pictures like “Heat” again. But the fact is that most films in the genre no longer promise as much box office as they did a few years ago.
“The Marvels” irritated the audience, “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania” even turned into a flop. Obviously, the calculation is based on “The Flash”, which was considered a beacon of hope for DC, for which they stuck with leading actor Ezra Miller despite stomach pains. The film is more or less a million-dollar grab. Production costs and advertising expenses are expected to add up to 400 million US dollars, while the box office revenue was just in the direction of 300 million US dollars. The idea behind this is by no means that DC is less cool compared to Marvel and is therefore doomed to box office failure.
Viewers miss originality
All of this is an indictment and at the same time an alarm signal. The sparrows have been whistling from the rooftops for years: the mass of manufactured entertainment films about strong people in rompers, full of special effects and supported by increasingly complicated story universes that actually only die-hard fans understand, are causing a tedium effect. The spectators are fed up. You miss the originality. They don’t just want sequels. They’ve had enough of the actors and experience that even those who are willing to pay a lot of money to beat up computer-created villains in front of green screens seem much fresher in other films. Just think of “Black Widow” star Florence Pugh, who you prefer to marvel at in “Midsommar,” who, even in ten minutes of “Oppenheimer,” radiates more charm as a supporting role than is possible in a paralyzingly calculated Marvel production. It’s no surprise that the most original superhero act of recent years, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, is an animated film.
Superheroes, as the pop specialists explained, appeared on the cinema scene as a matter of course because the world has become increasingly unsafe since September 11, 2001. Good and evil are blurring and crises and wars are not only getting closer, they are already here. People warm to the moral self-confidence of the heroes, and the streaming business also helped keep the ball in the game with even more sequels and series.
But the studios have miscalculated and are now trapped. Numerous productions are in the starting blocks until at least 2027, including new editions of well-known franchises. One failure after another could threaten even the largest media companies. The opportunities to make gigantic margins seem limited, if only because superhero films promised income primarily through their use on the big screen.
But after the corona pandemic, the audience never returned. Or when it comes, it expects more from a trip to the cinema. For example, fresh stories, a fascinating atmosphere that hasn’t already been damaged by series – and of course images that mean more than a trailer promises. This is also why Barbenheimer, the double pack of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”, became a hit and at the same time a hope for a renaissance of intelligent, original cinema. Is it possible that films are now only being made for a generation that grew up with superhero cinema and has remained loyal to it for a very long time? Do younger and, of course, especially older semesters prefer to see something different?
Superhero films were taken far too seriously
What once made superhero films the spearhead of the blockbuster movement was also the backing of a bloggosphere that, fueled by production companies willing to pay, wrote up everything this genre had to offer. With “The Dark Knight” and the “Avengers” the bourgeois features section also followed suit. The fascination with the supposedly last great stories of our time, which were declared to be metaphors for fragile social conditions, remained contained for years.
Now it’s over. Some old-school directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, with their critical assessment of the genre, may seem like bitter old people who don’t want to keep up with the times and are attached to a spectacle that had no competition for attention from the Internet in the 70s and 80s But the basic conclusion remains that Spider-Man, Batman and all the others as comic characters have certainly been given a certain depth over the decades, but ultimately offer too little breadth of variation for a visual storytelling medium like cinema. There is therefore an obvious reason why some cape wearers attract many spectators and others less so.
Many of the warriors who shone on the screen, whether equipped with superpowers or gifted with brains (and a lot of money), are creations from the last century. With their heavy presence, they also marked a nostalgic reminder of a long-gone pop culture that simply didn’t have to prove itself and was once ridiculed by the adult world for its infantile reflexes. It doesn’t help to set them up more diversely. Meanwhile, puberty is an eternally extended wish machine. The expiry date of the glut of superhero films may also be explained psychologically. With the challenges of a world in which the problems are becoming more comprehensive and escapism is no longer an easy solution, the superheroes appear more and more like projections from the children’s kingdom that pale in relation to the mosaic reality.
Maybe we need new superheroes, with different abilities, with a (magical) biography that also fits our times. For now, let’s leave it to the comics to birth them.