Getting Superhero Fatigue Before it Was Cool: My Early Case

As my blogging here shows, I had anticipated a collapse of interest in the superhero film genre long before the annus horriblis of 2023 that saw The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2 all crash and burn at the box office, throwing WBD and Disney-Marvel into crisis.

I guess that part of it was my taking a deeper interest in the genre than the general audience--familiarizing myself with the history of the form, not only picking up a comic now and then but actively trying to get to know the classics (reading my way through many a volume of the Marvel Essentials, etc.), and looking at it with the same critical gaze I had grown accustomed to applying to science fiction (for instance, thinking about whether there was any room for meaningful innovation left within the framework of the genre). It seemed to me that by Alan Moore's time the superhero comic book was already fairly late in its life cycle as a genre, and that impressive and significant as his work was, it just testified to the genre's approaching the end, rather than offering any source of renewal. (In art as in other things "deconstruction" is an end, not a beginning.)

However, there was also the fact that long before the twenty-first century boom in big-budget features about A-list Marvel and DC superheroes I had already seen plenty of the genre, and much of that stuck with me. There was the original 1978 Superman: The Movie and its first sequel (Superman II)--against which every other screen incarnation of the character would be measured and found wanting, precisely because later filmmakers failed to respect the spirit of the original vision as they indulged their pretensions to "adult" and "dark" and "gritty" matter, not that we had not already seen plenty of that before 2000. (Recall Tim Burton's Batman? Recall the '90s-era feature films depicting the Crow and Spawn and Blade?) And there were all those memorable small-screen versions, of which I have tended to grow more appreciative with the years--the old Adam West Batman, the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, and of course, the animated X-Men series (testimony to the lingering cultural presence of which is this X-Men '97 thing).

Of course, in spite of that I did enjoy many of the twenty-first century films--especially the first two of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, while if I became less impressed with them over time, I was also appreciative of the first two of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. I was in fact favorable to many a film that the common run of opinion treated fairly brutally--like the 2008 Hulk film, and the 2009 adaptation of Moore's classic Watchmen.

But it was, like everything else, part of a broader body of work that extended further into the past, all as I had developed likes and dislikes and standards the way everyone does when they see a lot of a thing. This left the offerings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe thin and flat and trite from the start. Meanwhile the X-Men movies, if increasingly dazzling visually, were far along the path of diminishing returns narratively, the reboot of Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield retreaded the same path far too soon, and Deadpool's ostentatious postmodernism (its self-awareness, its edgelordism) were wearisome. I still managed to have some positive words for 2015's Fantastic Four--but if there were some interesting elements there was no denying that taken as a whole it was a misfire, and amid a growing sense of creative exhaustion and sameness and desperation in arguing for the novelty of the newer offerings, it seemed less and less worth my while to try and catch every single new movie the way I once had done, as I wondered just how long all this could go on.

The financial catastrophes of last year, alas, answered that question--though it remains to be seen how the people in Hollywoodland will respond to that.