There’s that term again. Granted we can blame it’s use on the writer and not the celebrity being interviewed, but it’s still a crap term. Nobody talks about “rom-com fatigue” or “horror fatigue”, because there are still good ones. Superhero fatigue is a lie because it’s not the superheroes but lack of superheroing going on that people are sick of.
That didn’t stop Adam White of The Independent from using the term in an interview with Paul Dano, who portrayed the Riddler’s serial killer with a mission namesake in The Batman. While promoting the upcoming Netflix production Spaceman, which has nothing to do with superheroes so the only point I see is that White is one of those people looking to push the “superhero fatigue” narrative for his superhero-hating Hollywood pals, Dano had some interesting thoughts about why his movie was, in White’s words anyway, the “last stand” of superhero films.
Compare that with another interview with Captain America himself, Chris Evans. Tony Betti of Laughing Place was at Emerald City Comic Con, so the place you’d think he would get the superhero question but it actually comes up in passing as he talks about other movies he did and his dog more (at least one of those movies was Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, so it’s still comics). He did drop his own thoughts on superhero movies and seems a bit more positive. I guess when being Captain America in numerous films is part of your history versus one namesake take on a supervillain you get a brighter prospective.
In Dano’s interview he talks about playing a bunch of nerdy, “dorky” characters and how he didn’t like it at first and didn’t want to be typecast. That leads into this paragraph.
Over time, Dano has loosened up a little. The Batman, he says, was a major professional and personal pivot – he’d largely avoided work on that scale till then. “But I was able to really enjoy it. It wasn’t too much for me. I liked the fan fervour around it. I became a total Batman dork.” He even wrote a Riddler comic book, published to strong reviews in October 2022, that traced his interpretation of the character’s origins.
I haven’t read the comic so I can’t give you my thoughts on it other than why I don’t want to read it or the movie it’s based on. That’s not the Riddler. It’s not much of Batman either, but Robert Pattison isn’t part of this discussion. I don’t even blame them because it’s Matt Reeves and the screenwriters’ fault. The Riddler is a regular crook, except he likes to challenge his opponents, believing himself smarter than anyone. So riddle clues and puzzles are his way of taunting the heroes, seeing if they’re smart enough to stop him, which Batman often is even if one of his allies helps. The “Riddler” Dano was given is the type of killer I expect out of Seven, not Batman; a killer out to “expose the truth” of the corruption in Gotham and thinking Batman is just like him because they both supposedly fight bad guys. That’s not the Riddler, and while it isn’t Dano’s fault it’s still enough that I don’t want to see his take on Edward Nigma.
Today, on the heels of The Marvels, Madame Web and The Flash, The Batman feels a bit like one of the superhero genre’s last stands – that final gasp of money-making, crowd-pleasing, cape-and-cowl goodness before franchise fatigue set in. Does he have theories as to why The Batman made it out alive? “There are enough comic book movies where you just know what you’re gonna get. Reading the script for The Batman, you knew it was a real film. Every sentence… that’s just [writer/director] Matt Reeves.”
“Real film” because you don’t “know what you’re gonna get”. I knew what I was going to get with The Batman and even the favorable reviews tell me I’m right. Bruce is broke, Riddler isn’t fun, the whole thing is visually dark…it doesn’t look like fun. I also knew what I was going to get with The Marvels, Madame Web and Ezra Miller take on “Flashpoint” and didn’t want to deal with those, either. I didn’t bother seeing movies that tell me I’m a terrible person for being male or a movie that’s only celebrated for its Cameos: The Movie. I literally hear nothing about Spider-Man: No Way Home outside of the guest appearances from other Spider-Man films, and it’s the closest thing to positive I hear from The Flash. The Batman doesn’t come off as a superhero movie, or at least not the type of superhero movie that has what I like about superheroes. Honestly there have only been two of those thus far in theaters. One starred Adam West and the other Kevin Conroy. I’ve even been souring on the Tim Burton films as time has gone on, and the first one wasn’t too bad.
He thinks our current superhero malaise is the product of an erratic film industry. “It’s an interesting moment where everybody has to go like, ‘OK – what now?’ Hopefully from that, somebody either breathes new life into [comic book movies], or something else blossoms which is not superheroes. I’m sure there will still be some good ones yet to come, but I think it’s kind of a welcome moment.”
All you have to do is look at the successful superhero movies people still praise to this day and use THOSE as a guide. Superman: The Movie/II, Iron Man 1 and 2, Sam Rami’s first two Spider-Man movies, both the Tim Burton films (despite my negative view on especially the second one), Captain America: The First Avenger/The Winter Soldier, The Avengers (I could probably list a bunch of pre-Disney Marvel Studios movies) and even the Spider-Verse movies pushing Miles Morales all get praise from superhero fans and casual moviegoers alike. What are they doing right that the current crop of Disney Studios and Warner Brothers output aren’t? I don’t expect the surface viewers in Hollywood who think their audiences (their money source) are all idiots to have the answer. That takes effort and effort is not what Hollywood does anymore. Just ask Dano.
“It’s a larger thing, too,” he continues. “As soon as the word ‘content’ came into what we do – meaning making movies or TV – it meant quantity over quality, which I think was a big misstep. And I certainly don’t need that as a viewer or as an artist.”
We might disagree as to what “quality” means when it comes to superheroes. The Batman and his namesake Riddler are not what I want from superhero movies. Chris Evans, even with the World War II superhero movie, is more of what I want. Hope, aspirational, action, fun, COLORS and bright colors at that…this is what I want to see. Going over to his short discussion we see he gets it.
Thousands in attendance also lined up hours ahead of time (and those who couldn’t be there live streamed) a special panel featuring Chris Evans, known largely for his role as Captain America in numerous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
If you were expecting a large amount of conversation surrounding those experiences though, you were left a bit high and dry. Hosted by Popverse’s Veronica Valencia, the pair quickly touched upon the Marvel films, discussing what Evans said to be his favorite – Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Mine is the first one, but only barely since it lacks the “evil group taking over the government” political intrigue stuff. The Winter Soldier is a great Captain America movie, used the comics well as a guide without being enslaved, and was just a good story all around. It gave us +2 superheroes, which have been poorly used recently but used to be really cool.
He also shared that he feels that comic and superhero movies are often overlooked as films, commenting on the work and art that goes into them. He roused the crowd with a seemingly centered jab, though added afterward “not trying to throw shade” when he said “if they were easy to make, then there wouldn’t be so many bad ones.” Without specifying, Evans shared that there are some Marvel projects that he looks at and says they are “objectively phenomenal films.”
Blame the media snob’s pecking order. I talk about the format pecking order, but genre has this as well. They don’t like the “blockbusters” because the auteurs think every story must be some dark reflection of the human soul that makes you think and have “feelings”, or rather the “feelings” they think you should have because “happy” isn’t on that list. Superhero stories don’t need to have some deep, meaningful thing to say or push some currently popular social message (although they can and still be good), but they can be fun, uplifting, and positive, and usually are because that’s what most superhero movie goers want to see.
It’s also telling that the Laughing Place writer skims over the Scott Pilgrim talk (Evans voiced the recent animated version as well as playing one of the evil exes in the live action movie. It makes me wonder what else Evans said at the panel interview.
There is no “superhero fatigue”. The only fatigue is in Hollywood as creators who don’t care about superheroes, hate superhero fans, and want to convince everyone that their tastes alone matter or tell us how evil we are for not being as angry about (insert current popular cause here) as they are. Put people who care, stop shoving everything out there without seeing if its any good, show you care about the source material, and maybe finalize your story before doing thousands of reshoots after the whole movie is done and giving your special effects team until Tuesday to get it all done that costs you tons of money to do for less returns than it took to promote the darn thing. We of the audience has “creators who don’t give a damn” fatigue. Try working on that, folks.
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