Surveying those films that launched the hugely important summer movie season over the course of the twenty-first century one finds that it is not only the case that nearly every first weekend of that season since 2008 has been launched by a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film (beginning with that year's Iron Man), with this the case for each and every proper summer season since 2015.* It is also the case that since 2002 just about every summer movie season was launched by a Marvel superhero epic--with the Spider-Man (2002, 2004, 2007) and X-Men (2003) movies arrived before the MCU came along, and filling in the gaps in most of those rare years after Iron Man when there was no MCU film scheduled for that weekend (2009, 2014).**
It was an extraordinary run testifying to the extraordinary popularity not just of the MCU, but the broader Marvel brand, and the superhero film generally.
Of course, 2024 will not be seeing an MCU, or any Marvel or even superhero, release on the first weekend of summer. Instead the season will open with . . . The Fall Guy.
This may seem just a blip. After all, Captain America 4 was supposed to open that critical first weekend, but this was made impossible by last year's double-strike by Hollywood's
actors and writers. However, it is also the case that the MCU, and the superhero genre more broadly, have had a very rough year and a half at this point, with Marvel's Phase Four clearly troubled by the time of Thor 4 (from which point on sequels were making 20 to 50 percent less in real terms than the films which preceded them), and Captain Marvel 2 proved a catastrophe, its global gross ultimately a mere 15 percent that of the original. As the situation stands, Disney-Marvel may still plan to have The Thunderbolts, at least, out on May 2, 2025, and may still succeed in doing that--but barring a turnaround in the fortunes of the franchise and the genre the results will only testify to the passing of their old market dominance.
* The films are, respectively, Iron Man) (2008) and its two sequels (2010, 2013), the first Thor movie (2011), the third Captain America movie (2016), the four Avengers films (2012, 2015, 2018, 2019), the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies (2017, 2023), and Dr. Strange 2 (2022). (Where the exceptional 2020-2021 period is concerned it is worth remembering that Black Widow was scheduled for the first weekend of May 2020, and delayed only by the pandemic, which had a sufficiently distorting effect on the summer of 2021 that the author of this post also does not count it as a "proper" summer.)
** The films in question were X-Men: Wolverine in 2009 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014. The sole years in which this did not occur were 2005 and 2006 (kicked off by Ridley Scott's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, and Mission: Impossible III, respectively, both significant disappointments that ultimately underlined just how important the superhero film was to become in this period).
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2 comments:
Regarding the Impossible Missions Force, which you obliquely alluded to, citing them as at least implicitly outside of the genre seems a tad odd, as they seem to often avail of technology further to what remains available on the open and/or clandestine market as of current levels of technology. Jeff Rovin, though, did include said team in his work Adventure Heroes, where he usually assigned adventurers of more mundane abilities, paraphernalia, and/or accouterments.
https://whowatchesthewatchers.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=160#p160
To digress a bit, over on Supermegamonkey.net, for a comparison, a poster made the curious comment:
"Captain Britain is something of an odd hero. Superheroes are a peculiarly American genre, which never really took off in British comics (Marvel UK's flagship titles were Star Wars/The Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi; Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly/Magazine; and Transformers)".
The properties cited would probably not serve as Platonic ideals for those who prefer mundane protagonists.
I certainly get what you're saying here. Personally I've long found the term "spy-fi" useful as a way of thinking about shows and movies like Mission: Impossible. Incidentally the Wikipedia article on the term--the address of which I present below--specifically includes Mission: Impossible as an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy-fi_(subgenre)
Still, if the gadgets keep it from being mundane, much else we associate with superheroes is not present, as with the use of a costumed public persona to conceal their identity. Ethan Hunt has his devices, but in the end he is still Ethan Hunt, and only assumes cover identities as his missions require, not as a matter of a sustained public persona. So does it also go with his enemies, who lack the supervillain trappings, none of them seeming like a Joker, for example.
As to the issue of superheroes as "peculiarly" American--other countries do have superhero fiction, but it is common to argue that the superhero as we usually talk about them (costumed heroes, etc.) has been more prominent in American culture than elsewhere. (I even remember people saying that the Dr. Who episode "The Return of Captain Mysterio" went over better in the U.S. than in Britain because superheroes are more popular in the U.S..) I haven't really explored this deeply--it could be that this is a case of American commentators overlooking a lot of popular culture elsewhere--but the point is that this opinion doesn't surprise me.
Thanks for writing!
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