My 2500th Blog Post

 

Where Are All
The Heroes?

2500th Blog

For my 2500th Blog Post I thought I’d have a look at the current cinematic battleground for two competing comic book companies, Marvel and DC... giving my views on just what is happening with these two behemoth’s in 2024. And I don’t mean specifically movies based on comic books (which can be a whole other thing)... I mean super hero movies, which are the dominant strand of that genre, to be sure.

So... is superhero fatigue really setting in?

I know it did for some people around about seven years ago, when regular Marvel/DC consuming friends and acquaintances I know just stopped going to see either company’s movies. I am, I guess, a hanger on but, I think it’s about to get really interesting sometime next year. So, musicals and westerns are two genres I can think of off-hand which were huge with cinema audiences at one stage but, though they’re still occasionally made, the box office for these things dropped considerably (some decades ago) and getting one greenlit in either category seems like the exception to the rule these days.

Now, here’s the thing... Marvel and DC haven’t got a lot going on this year. DC are busy turning their back on all the good work they’ve been doing for the last decade or so by rebooting the franchise completely (a foolish decision in my humble opinion), sometime for a 2025 Superman movie to kick it all off again. So that means the only film they have coming, in October of this year (at time of writing) is the stand alone, non DC universe sequel Joker - Folie à Deux. Marvel are kind of in a similar situation in that they have only one pure Marvel Cinematic Universe movie coming up this year, a sequel to two non-MCU movies... namely Deadpool 3. Now, there are also three of Sony’s sideways Marvel spin offs coming in 2024 but they’re all based on supporting characters from another character’s comics (all of them being Spider-Man, in this case) and so they’re a) not closely associated with the MCU brand of Marvel and b) not exactly top tier characters... so we have movies of Madame Web, Kraven The Hunter (why, for goodness sake, do this classic Spider-Man villain without Spider-Man?) and, what may possibly be the only successful one of the lot... Venom 3.

And none of those are guaranteed successes (even Deadpool 3, if they handle it badly). Now, the studios are making it known (probably with a degree of exaggeration) that the writer and actor strikes affected their plans badly but... I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think what’s going on is bad box office. Off the top of my head, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 (reviewed here) was the only superhero movie that made any real money (enough to be considered a strong success to the company, at least). Other live action Marvel and DC movies of 2023 such as Shazam - Fury Of The Gods (reviewed here), Ant Man And The Wasp - Quantumania (reviewed here), The Flash (reviewed here), The Marvels (reviewed here), Blue Beetle (reviewed here) and Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom (reviewed here)... were all big failures from what I can make out.

But hold on a minute... I say big failures but I’m talking about money because, as far as I’m concerned, we got some of the most interesting superhero movies of the lot last year. I mean, okay, The Flash and Quantumania were pretty dire but, all of those other ones I mentioned, actually had a lot going for them (very surprisingly, in the case of Blue Beetle) but, it doesn’t matter because most of them got a hard, critical mauling (not from me) and did terrible business (again, relative to the greedy expectations of the companies bankrolling them, at least).

So I’m guessing the lesson learned by these two giant corporations is... time for a soft reboot (or in DC’s case, a hard reboot, it would seem) to try and get things back on track. After all, quality movies do not make for quality box office and, in the case of the 2023 slate of superhero movies... that certainly was true. So cinematically, 2024 is going to feel very strange and desolate. I’m guessing there will be a lot more bigger budget horror movies stepping up to fill that superhero void and I’m guessing that these will also start to receive mixed to negative reviews before long (horror movies definitely seem to have a cyclic nature in terms of their box office success from decade to decade... usually when the world governments are having some kind of crisis, which means their box office foothold has been particularly strong for a while now).

Are we, then, finally reaching the end of an era for the superhero genre? The fatigue that keeps getting predicted? Well, I hope not but then again, in the period between the 1930s to the mid 1960s, I bet people thought westerns and musicals would be popular forever. So who can say just how things will roll but, beware, things like physical media releases could be in jeopardy too if these superhero movies continue to fail and studio heads (as they often do) see this as a sign of certain revenue streams failing because of the quality of the product (as opposed to what is just a lack of interest in that product). Time will tell, I guess.

In the meantime, that marked my 2500th blog post so, whether you’ve read all of them or just this one, thanks so much for taking the time to peruse.

Merry Christmas 2017

Merry Christmas to
all of my readers...

It’s been an interesting year and, once again, thanks to everybody who looked at this blog, even if it was only once... it’s always very much appreciated.

I think I’ve proven to myself that there’s absolutely no way I’m going to accurately predict what reviews are coming up in 2018, other than the usual end of year fixtures. Once again, I didn’t even get a fraction of the posts that I wanted to get done up here but, this year in particular, there’s a pretty good reason for this...

I’ll touch on this again in my inevitable End of Year Best Movies listing but I will mention here that, probably the main reason I’ve not got all the films watched and reviewed that I wanted to this year was because my cinema attendance was probably a fair bit greater than usual. Which puzzles me because I’m told that this has been the worst single year for cinema attendance since the 1980s. Well, that may be so but I can confidently say that, as far as I’m concerned, this has been one of the best years for interesting and rich film experiences in cinemas for quite some time. Also, it seems that the Americans have been making some extraordinary product this year too. So, I dunno... maybe when there are really varied and interesting films at cinemas... movies like Wonder Woman, A Ghost Story, Miss Sloane, Brigsby Bear and La La Land... then the kinds of people who do attend cinemas are maybe not necessarily actual fans of fine films. That is to say, maybe they’re there for the buckets of popcorn and an unwavering devotion to the, somewhat stagnant, blockbuster style ‘event movies’ where everything is edited together very abruptly and lots of things explode.

Not that I’m saying these aren't valid expressions of film as art... of course they are (and I love them too)... but maybe the kinds of collective audiences who make up these screenings are so fixated on this kind of, ‘almost exactly the same as any other’ dose of cleverly put together spectacle that they’re missing out on some of the more original and moving product out there. If that’s the case, we are in for a terrible time at the cinemas over the next few years as companies jostle to make an abundance of superhero movies (which are almost the only things which are making any money at the moment) at the cost of everything else. That would be a shame but, on the other hand, if they continue to go down that line then I’m pretty sure the already over saturated market will be delivering some truly worrying box office returns to the companies after a while... and then they’ll start panicking and maybe begin taking a few risks on different styles of cinematic art again... perhaps.

We shall have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, it will be business as usual at the NUTS4R2 blog. Things which I definitely know will be happening are the review of today's Doctor Who Christmas Special within the next day or so... plus the Best Movies of 2017 and, at some point in the next month, the Best Score CDs of 2017. And, of course, my Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz is up and running right here so, if you find yourself at a loose end over the next week, maybe give that a go.

Either way, though, have a very Merry Christmas and I hope this yuletide holiday brings you a brief respite from the strange horrors of the world right now. Have a great time.