To Everything There is a Season
"superhero fatigue" is a dumb way to reference the fact that all things must pass
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I’m not dumb enough to declare comic book movies dead. Next year will be rough, though the third Deadpool movie will do well at the box office, keeping hope alive. (I emphasize that it’s the third of those movies because, like the Austin Powers and John Wick films before them, the Deadpool movies are a perfect example of Hollywood giving us too much of something that could only really work in small doses.) But Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, to be released December 22nd but effectively kicking off the 2024 movie slate, is tracking badly, after the original made a billion dollars; whatever Deadpool’s weird relationship to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s no real mainline entry in that one-time juggernaut franchise; the trailer for Madame Web, the next entry in Sony’s weird and stumbling Spiderman universe, is eliciting guffaws even from the nerd faithful; to me, Kraven the Hunter looks even worse. The new (musical! Lady Gaga co-starring!) Joker movie could be fun, but could also be dreadful, and anyway it’s a long way from capes and skybeams. This year, the MCU saw its first true flop, Ant-Man Quantumania, which also happened to be an enervating slog through The Marvels was much better received critically, but saw the worst ever Marvel opening weekend, fifteen years after the first film. “The multiverse” has trapped both Marvel and DC in storylines where because anything can happen, nothing has meaning. Although everyone is too sensible to count superheroes out, at this point almost nobody denies that this wing of our pop culture is in a sorry state.
There’s a lot of reasons, big and small, that could help account for this decline, and we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the box office in general is in one of the most precarious positions its ever been in since the birth of the cinema. But I think that the hoary old analogy to Westerns, while very annoying to some, has always had it basically right. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Westerns were one of the most common types of films being made - from 1930 to 1954, some 2400 Westerns were put out professionally. The conveniently-easy math tells me that that’s about 100 a year. And then, Westerns stopped being produced at such a rapid pace, in line with broader trends in Hollywood release economics but also no doubt reflecting audience tastes. They still make Westerns now, just like they’ll always make superhero films. But they make a lot fewer of them, and whether the end of the comic book movie era is today or in five years or in ten, the same thing that happened to the Lone Ranger will happen to our Captain Americas and our Green Lanterns. Please note that this is not a tragedy, or an insult, or a crisis, nor does it have to be squeezed into the notion of “superhero fatigue.” It’s a simple, natural kind of moving on, something our culture has a harder and harder time with these days, and a healthy development for everyone, including the diehard comic book fans. Because to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.