BW Vs Bleeding Fool> Superheroes STILL Don’t Need A Break

Why do we keep having this conversation. Come to think of it, why do we keep rehashing most of these conversations lately? Maybe because we focus on the wrong problem.

Admittedly I’m a huge superhero fan. I grew up at a time when being a superhero fan was rewarded with content. From new stuff to reruns of original stuff back when black and white wasn’t a deterrent (I still blame Ted Turner’s obsession with colorizing old movies), there was a lot of superhero shows, while movies with superheroes continued to pop up. It was a great time to love superheroes. Also admittedly we don’t necessarily live in those times.

We do have more superhero stuff coming out, but a lot of it is being poorly received, and I do acknowledge why. Heck, the article I’m about to go up against from geek media site Bleeding Fool and writer A.H. Lloyd also acknowledges why at point…and then takes the scorched earth approach to the superhero genre, with the title “After 35 Marvel Movies & Six Batmans, The World Needs A Break“, except his solution is a break from the entire genre. I can’t help but disagree even when I agree with him. I wasn’t even going to make this a Vs article originally but It eventually felt like it fits the series, so here we go. Read the article so you know I’m not taking things out of context (or can yell at me if I am) and let’s dive into this discussion. Again.

Lloyd starts out by discussing the lame attempts at spinning the poor box office numbers for Captain America: Brave New World, which is still one of Marvel’s worst performers under the Disney ownership period. He also notes that Daredevil: Born Again (which has mixed reviews even among the superhero fanbase) and Agatha All Along (which is not mixed because everyone agrees it stinks) are barely watched by Disney+ subscribers. Then again Andor and Skeleton Crew are supposed to be good examples of good Star Wars shows and are suffering the same issue but with less buzz than the Marvel shows. The key similarity here is modern Disney, which hasn’t been producing anything worthwhile from any of its acquisitions. The latest Alien movie, the live action Snow White demake, anything under the Pixar brand, and even stuff featuring their legacy characters have also crashed and burned. They don’t even do their own work with their legacy, letting other animation studios make Mickey Mouse and friends. The last time they did anything it was reworking footage of old Ludwig Von Drake appearances with new voice acting to save Iger’s board of directors.

It’s Not The Nineties Anymore

One of the core issues with this whole superhero movie industry is that they forgot what the point of it was.  Superhero films were initially profitable because they tapped into a pent-up audience desire to see their childhood icons on the big screen.  Comic book culture was perhaps rooted in nerdom, but by the time Saturday morning cartoons were featuring Super Friends and you had TV shows based on Superman, Batman, Spider Man and Wonder Woman, the concept was pretty mainstream.

That was mostly 1980s but I get his point, plus I’m being pedantic given where he goes from here. However, this wasn’t even close to all the superhero stuff on TV at the time. Some of it was heavy superhero, like the Spider-Man cartoons, Superman and Batman cartoons, The Greatest American Hero and Sable, and other shows and movies. Low budget superhero works like The Pumaman were coming out after the success of Superman: The Movie, but while it’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder for a reason, kid me liked the concepts even if adult me laughs at some of the execution.

Superheroes also used to be fun for all ages. Now it isn’t fun for any age.

Superheroes even influenced other genres. Shows like SilverHawks, Mighty Orbots, Filmation’s rework of their original Ghostbusters from Mission: Impossible influence to superhero influence alongside their takes on He-Man and She-Ra and even the sci-fi Western Bravestarr with the title character’s superpowers all fit in nicely in the same way pre-Disney Marvel worked superheroes into World War II and fantasy/mythological scenarios. I could write a huge list of all the superhero and superhero influenced shows that came out when I was a kid, and just with new shows that would be a pretty long list. If anything the 1990s had a similar superhero presence as the 1980s. The difference was this was alongside pure and action sci-fi, fantasy, dramas, comedies, romantic comedies, and everything else that was still being produced. Even the traditional Western, while beginning the slide into gritty “grounded in reality” takes, was still out there.

The initial run of Superman films was quite lucrative and that set the stage for others to follow.  The 1989 Batman was a lavish production, and quite the big deal at the time, attracting a top-notch cast, not one but two soundtrack albums, and it laid the groundwork for several sequels (of varying quality) as well as the X-Men.  At that same time, minor works such as The Crow and Blade were making waves.  Sam Raimi, who would go on to direct Spider Man, cut his teeth on Darkman, which was something of a cult hit and you can see some of his later flourishes being developed.

Even Robert Townsend, know for Hollywood Shuffle and his raunch HBO specials, produced and starred in The Meteor Man, and not the last family oriented superhero movie with an all-black cast. (Deal with it, Black Panther. You aren’t special.) Meanwhile TV was also breaking out superhero shows in the 1990s. The Night Man and Super Force were only two live action superhero shows in syndication. The DCAU was starting up, and Ultraforce were trying to capitalize on the success of X-Men, both produced by Saban Entertainment. The Flash hit CBS to capitalize on Tim Burton’s Batman, even getting Danny Elfman to work on the music. The same creators tried to get MANTIS on TV, though the series was a pale imitation of the pilot movie. The Phantom and the Shadow, newspaper comic strip and pulp/radio heroes that grandfathered into superheroes, both had movies, while the Phantom had a future set TV series. I wouldn’t even call Blade a superhero movie. While the comic is set in the Marvel universe, what I know of the movie wasn’t, and even the Punisher movie was more of an action flick like the movies that inspired the comic in the first place. The Power Rangers franchise was bringing over Japanese superhero concepts, leading to a revival of interest in Ultraman and adding something new to the genre in the West. Again, that’s not even close to a full list, though it always did lean more towards animation.

Disney has converted that into an automated assembly line, endlessly churning out product strip-mined from Marvel’s extensive back catalog. There is no buzz about heroes arriving on the screen, just dread at what Disney will do to the lore.  The DC Universe has already run into a ditch and frantically trying to dig its way out, but none of the bystanders care.  Sad to say, we’ve been here before.

That’s not the fault of the genre. It’s the fault of Disney and Warner Brothers seeing dollar signs and not understanding how to turn that into actual dollars. Disney as a whole is an automated assembly line, doing the same thing with Star Wars and their live action de-makes of classic animated works, while Paramount has brought that to Star Trek once bringing the movie studio and the TV arms of Viacom back together into one company.

A wild frenzy of activity followed as every possible space-based script was dug out and filmed.  It was in this hot-house environment that we got such oddities as The Black Hole, Battle Beyond the Stars, Flash Gordon as well as instant classics like Alien. Battlestar Galactica was a ratings monster until it was successfully counter-programmed.  Star Trek got a huge boost and the long-delayed movie was finally filmed and a new TV followed.

The point is that we have seen this kind of zeitgeist come and go.  Six years later, Star Wars was retired, Star Trek was cycling down and action movies dominated movie screens.

“Sorry, Superboy, but we don’t see a TV series for you.” “But I’ve had two!”

Did it really? Both “Star” franchises still had TV, books, comics, and the rising genre of video games to create more stories. Battlestar Galactica was only shut down by ABC because they asked for Star Wars levels of special effects and set design, and then realized the price tag that came with that was unsustainable for television at the time. Fans would have happily taken a second season and was disappointed by Galactica: 1980. From the UK we were getting Doctor Who, Blakes 7, and the original Tomorrow People, which got a remake in the 1990s along with Land Of The Lost. When those shows ended the properties would still pop up again, as the two BBC offerings were shut down for reasons outside the fans.

And at no point did anyone demand the science fiction genre needed “a break”. It kept chugging along, each series, movie, and other media adding something different to the genre whether it was a new take on previous content or a new work alongside those older properties hoping to reach a similar level of relevance. That got us shows like Babylon 5, though it also had less successful attempts like Space Precinct. Riffing fodder was also still coming out, but sci-fi was hardly along the levels of the video game crash of the 1980s, which is what this article is making superheroes sound like now. Nintendo didn’t give upon video games and now, despite certain parties best efforts, has become a storytelling format in its own right, even if they’re starting to suffer the same issues as movies and comics by having people who don’t care about them working on them and suffering under the media pecking order.

Is there room for superheroes in film and TV?  Sure, but it’s got to be a niche thing again.  You can’t have a film ‘event’ if it never ends.  There has to be a sense that you have to see it now, because it won’t be coming back.  Right now, the arrival of a new Disney Marvel project has less anticipation than the egg delivery at the local supermarket.  To put it another way, the James Bond franchise took 59 years to produce 25 films; Disney beat that score by ten in 1/3 of the time.  (Yes, Bond nerds, this total excludes independent productions like  Never Say Never Again and the 1967 Casino Royale.)

That’s also one character, though Amazon is certainly discussing making spinoffs, which the franchise doesn’t need. The James Bond movies also went too far away from not only the Ian Fleming novels by giving us a broken Bond, another in a line of classic heroes destroyed, but moving away from the hidden gadgets, mad scientists, sexy women with suggestive names, and Bond being Bond that made the movies popular and led to spinoffs of its own like the Derek Flint movies. It’s resulted in the same complaints from Bond fans that superhero fans have about current content from movies and streaming. It’s not an entire genre and other spy movies found their own way, like the Jason Borne franchise.

The assembly line approach also destroys storytelling.  When films had no guarantee of a sequel, that hey to be ruthlessly efficient.  Batman ’89 joined the story in progress, giving us flashbacks rather than lengthy and ponderous exposition.  Superman ’78  likewise moved at a rapid clip.

Contrast that with Madame Web, which was the overture for a production that will never be made (and which also wasted Sydney Sweeney’s greatest assets in the process).

Again, not the fault of the genre when Disney is moving away from what made the MCU work before they took it over, and Warner Brothers not understanding why either their past movies or the pre-Disney Marvel movies did. Spider-Man by Sam Rami brought superhero movies back to prominence and the early Fox X-Men movies solidified that superheroes had a place in our entertainment. It’s the people in charge of it that are making bad product instead of great stories because the higher-ups don’t understand what was working and give the franchises to people who don’t care about superheroes or comic books. Marvel got rid of their committee that was making sure the core concepts were still being used and gave it to people who literally don’t want to do proper adaptations because what they want is more important to them. Meanwhile, one of the reasons Marvel Rivals is so successful in gaming circles is that they have someone who keeps the characters accurate to the comic without losing the narrative they’re creating. DC Universe did pretty well, too, though they don’t really promote that game anymore, and it’s a spiritual replacement for City Of Heroes.

If every movie is assumed to have a movie after it, there’s no urgency to the production.  We now have entire films with nothing but the backstory in them, essentially a two-hour introduction to some future three-hour film that is supposed to actually advance the plot.  Even streaming shows can move at a snail’s pace, padding the minutes to increase the download minutes.  Agatha All Along probably could have been a decent straight-to-video 90-minute film, but as a series it was intolerable.

What about the Lord Of The Rings movies? That was planned as a multiple movie story, as was Back To The Future or the Star Wars prequels, which gave us a bunch of animated spinoff series after the original trilogy gave us two Ewoks movies and a cartoon alongside R2 & 3PO. Again, only one series, not a whole genre.

Moreover, there are no stakes in any of the films because even if a character “dies,” there is always another reboot on the horizon.

Thus we have a killer combination of oversaturation, plodding pacing and stories with zero dramatic heft.

All of the reboots and reimaginings have been an issue for years in multiple franchises and genres.  I will grant you that Marvel and DC’s studios could benefit from a slowdown and reassessment, but that’s not the fault of superheroes. There are superhero offerings from outside those circles, and always have been. I still don’t understand why superheroes as a genre keeps getting signaled out from sci-fi, fantasy, westerns, horror (which The Crow and Blade are more like), romantic comedies, musicals, or every other genre of entertainment out there. Why should superheroes stop altogether?

DC and Marvel need a slowdown but not a full stoppage. They need to go back to basics, back to what was working, understand why it was working, and put people on those projects who at least care about doing it right, letting the other directors prove their ideas ALSO have a potential audience if given a chance rather than letting them ruin superheroes and characters that predate their birth because their egos matter more than a genre they don’t care about based on a form of media they care even less about. They need to properly form their shared universe like early Marvel Studios did, or signal out projects for a solo offering only connected by sharing a universe, which is how comics and smaller shared franchises like all the St. Elsewhere connected shows or NCIS and Law & Order franchises do. (Is the UK Law & Order franchise connected to the US one or is it more like The Office where they just share a name and concept?)

Superheroes don’t need to stop any more than any other genre. Romantic comedies need a comeback. Action movies need a comeback. Westerns need a comeback. War movies need a comeback, if you ask my dad. In all those cases what it needs is a back to basics approach, to find out how to properly modernize while retaining everything that made those genres popular and special. That’s what superheroes need as well. Not to go away, but to fix what’s broken. To paraphrase a controversial expression, they just need to make superheroes great again…as soon as they figure out what that means, if they can stop being lazy long enough to do so. That’s not a superhero thing. Based on all the current stats, that’s just modern entertainment in general.