What Do the Superhero Flops Tell Us About the Box Office Today?

It has long been generally recognized that getting audiences out to a movie increasingly requires the audience's perceiving a film's release as an "event." Once upon a time splashy big-budget action blockbusters almost automatically had event status. However, there are now so many of them that something more is required, and increasingly it seems the case that, even where superhero movies are concerned, the "second-stringers" will not "cut it"--with a movie with a less well-known protagonist and a budget in the range of a "mere" $100 million falling into that category, as with a Shazam. Meanwhile, in the wake of the anticlimax anything past the Battle with Thanos has been (and probably could only have been), and the lack of ideas that even by superhero blockbuster standards could be called "compelling" for those films that followed (Spider-Man's big multiverse event excepted) it has been harder and harder to make the multiple Marvel releases still coming the audience's way seem like the "event" they were in the days before there had already been thirty of them (!), as evidenced by the less than triumphant result of the decision to debut the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Five with Ant-Man 3--the second-stringer, even when given a more than usually prominent place in the bigger mythos and backed with a $200 million budget not delivering the goods.

We hear from time to time of Marvel fatigue, and that could seem a consideration, but as the case of Shazam 2 and much else shows, there may also be DC fatigue, and superhero fatigue, and big sci-fi actioner fatigue, and blockbuster fatigue. After all, the action movie, and the high-concept blockbuster as we know it generally, go back to the '60s-era James Bond films, thoroughly arrived in Hollywood with Star Wars, and have been a routine and increasingly large part of our cinematic diet since the '80s. The result is that no one under the age of fifty can remember a time when the movie houses were not full of the stuff, which can now seem pretty well played-out, even down to the visuals (the CGI boom so clearly underway with the original Jurassic Park now entering its fourth decade)--and while, admittedly, critics who thought there was too much such stuff have been forecasting its demise for decades, I suspect they are right in, if not necessarily the boom going bust, then at least the peak for this kind of film-making passing. If so, this will confront the industry with some hard decisions that, to all evidences, it is spectacularly ill-equipped to make. Of course, so it seemed as the studio system was falling apart--and from that emerged a New Hollywood today remembered as one of the most vibrant periods in the history of American cinema. Still, as a significant chronicler of that period recounted, that was a very different world from this, financially, technologically, politically and culturally, and I suspect that should history indeed repeat itself in this respect, it will do so only as farce.