To quote Reverend Lovejoy: “The short answer, yes. The long
answer, no with a but”. There really is no reason why we cannot have several
different superhero movies a year. I think, in some ways, superhero movies are
this generation’s Westerns – good guys vs. bad guys on a typically black and
white morality scale – with a few great ones that try for something a little
deeper. Hollywood churned out tons of Westerns a year in their heyday. Why?
Because audiences liked them, and they made money. The same is true for
superhero movies. There are hundreds of comic book characters – from the iconic
to the largely unknown – and many of them have literally decades of storylines
to draw from. Therefore, we should be able to get quite a few comic book movies
every year, and not have them feel redundant. (Devin Faraci also makes the
Western comparison in a recent piece – that I had not read when I wrote this). It’s
also worth pointing out, that of the four examples listed, only two or
superhero movies – something that doesn’t apply to Transformers or Sin City.
The reality however is that they are all starting to look
and feel the same. Each series typically follows the arch established by the Superman
movies – with the first one being the origin story where our hero discovers his
(and it’s always a him) powers, has fun with them, decides to fight crime, and
then ends up against a big bad guy in the end that he (barely) defeats. By the
second movie, our hero is starting to see that being a superhero isn’t all glamorous
– that “With great power comes great responsibility” – so they have to push
away the ones they love in order to protect them – or else they struggle with
even wanting to be a superhero anymore, before they realize they have to, and
they face an even more powerful bad guy in the end, which they barely defeat.
By the third movie, the filmmakers seem out of ideas, and just throw every villain
they can think at the screen and hope something works. Audiences grow restless,
the series “goes away” from an increasingly short period of time and then it’s
rebooted and tells the exact same story again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Nowhere is this more apparent than The Amazing Spiderman
movies (my review of number 2 will be posted soon). I thought the first movie
may well have been a better film than Sam Raimi’s original Spiderman (of which
I wasn’t a big fan) – but it was essentially the same story, so I was left
underwhelmed. Number 2 is basically the same structure of Spiderman 2 (Raimi’s
best of the series). I enjoyed both The Amazing Spiderman and The Amazing
Spiderman 2 – but it’s hard to argue that either really adds anything to what
Raimi already did. What’s disappointing of course is that Spiderman has been
around for a long, long time. Surely there’s some fertile ground somewhere in
all those back issues of the comics that the filmmakers could have mined to come
up with something unique. That’s one of the reasons I liked The Wolverine last
summer. It’s hardly a great superhero movie – but it was a different one – a mainly
standalone effort, where the fate of the free world didn’t hang in the balance.
I think we reached the tipping point back in 2012 when The
Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. One could make a darker superhero movie
than Nolan’s trilogy – but do we really want them to? Some complained they took
themselves too seriously already. And one could make a bigger superhero film
than The Avengers – but again, do we really want them to? That film, as
entertaining as it was, was already a little too overcrowded. Those two films
basically threw down the gauntlet for all others to follow – try and beat that
they said. Sadly, no one has really come close since. I still enjoy superhero
movies – sometimes, they can even still surprise me – as the latest Captain
America did. But for the most part, I think filmmakers need to find something
new and different – a different take on the genre – if we’re going to get
another truly great superhero movie. So far, no one really has. 
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