Are the Superhero Movies of Today in the Same Place as the Musicals of the Late '60s?

When we look into the history of the film of the 1960s we are apt to be regaled with tales of the edgy New Hollywood, stressing its countercultural impulses and its artistic experimentalism and its radical politics and its generally avant garde, edgier, racier material.

One would never guess from such writing that the biggest box office hit of the decade was . . . The Sound of Music.

One would also never guess that this success did not come out of nowhere--or end with it. After all, the studios, trying to compete with TV, went in for Panavision-Technicolor spectacle, with the choice of content favoring the historical epic (usually Biblical or early Roman Empire, or World War II, though with a sprinkling of Westerns and Medieval adventure), and the splashy, often Broadway hit-derived musical, and steadily "going bigger" in the process. Of course, they were not long in hitting a limit. The colossal Cleopatra (which cost $31 million to produce, and another $13 million to market and distribute), was budget-busting even by today's standards, and even as the biggest moneymaker of its year (1963) regarded as an underperformer. That result, along with that on Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire the following year (a $16 million production that made back a lot less than that), pretty much marked the end of the readiness to back big historical epics.* But The Sound of Music (1965) suggested musicals were still worthwhile, and sheer box office earnings encouraged the studios to pour ever more money into such projects--like Camelot, Oliver!, and in 1969, Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, and Hello, Dolly!

The results varied commercially, as well as artistically, but people did see them. In fact, Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! were among their year's top ten hits. The problem was that so much money had been poured into them, and the expectations that drove such open-handedness were so high, that, like Cleopatra, even being fair-sized hits they were deemed disappointments that helped end the long-running fashion, and even more certainly the scaling up so long evident. Of course, for all that Hollywood has never stopped making musicals, and even scoring significant hits with them (Fiddler on the Roof, Grease, Chicago). However, I think it safe to say that the genre never recovered its fecundity, or place at the box office, the really new but old-style musical a rarity--while if some musicals do become big money-makers commercially the genre, save for the occasional big animated film, rarely become really first-rank hits. Indeed, these days, thinking of a likely hit we are likely to think not of the musical genre but the big splashy sci-fi action movie, and especially the superhero movie, which seems to me in similar territory these days as the musicals were in back in the '60s. The studios, hard-pressed to get people away from their newfangled gadgets and counting on ever-more spectacular films from a very short list of genres to do it, keep pouring ever-more money into colossal films of the type--productions so big that they can only be justified by extraordinary expectations that consistently lead to serious disappointment (the DC Extended Universe, almost all of Marvel after Phase Three, etc., etc.), so much so that it might not take much more disappointment to make the game appear to be no longer worth the candle.

Of course, as the predominance of the old musical waned other genres were emergent. In a reminder that the Hollywood executives of a half century ago were probably not much more intelligent than those of today they proved very slow indeed to catch on to the potential of the action film--and in one of the greater ironies of film history's more recent decades, it actually fell to a Godard-loving auteur theory-minded film school graduated upstart to make them appreciate it. But if any new genre promises sufficient theatrical draw to keep Hollywood viable along anything like its current lines is emergent the fact would seem to have escaped everyone, such that I would not bet on some latterday George Lucas supplying the Suits with another basis for building a hit factory.

* Adjusted for inflation the production budget for Cleopatra comes to $300 million (with distribution and promotion costing another $120 million).