Superheroes and Star Wars may have crowded original blockbusters out of theaters, but they’re thriving on Netflix and Amazon.
It’s become fashionable of late for lauded A-list directors to express their dislike for superhero movies. The most profile was Ridley Scott, who said, among other things, that “their scripts are not any f*****g good”. Others who’ve taken aim at cinema’s most lucrative genre include The Piano’s Jane Campion (“I actually hate them”) and Martin Scorsese (“It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being”). All three filmmakers have back catalogs and reputations strong enough to make people sit up and take notice, but criticising an entire genre feels slightly reductive. Sure, there are some absolutely terrible superhero films out there, but plenty of Marvel and DC movies have also received widespread acclaim – Black Panther even picked up a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars. So the problem with superhero movies is not their quality, as much as the fact that they – along with other major franchises like Star Wars and Fast & Furious – have a tendency to starve box office oxygen from everything else. Or, as Dune and MCU star Stellan Skarsgård eloquently put it in an interview with the Guardian: “There’s no distribution channels for all the mid-budget films that have the best actors, the best writing because they can’t throw up $3 million for a marketing campaign. When cinemas let them in, they do so for one week and if it doesn’t pay off in a week, they’re gone.” Skarsgård was seemingly referring to the sort of quality dramas that traditionally get mentioned in conversations about awards, but the rise of the superhero has also resulted in another casualty, less likely to be lamented by those who discuss cinema as art – you really don’t see many non-franchise action movies on the big screen any more. This state-of-play would have been incomprehensible in the ’90s and early ’00s, when theater lobbies were littered with posters and standees for movies about guys – and back then it was always guys – with a penchant for firing lots of weapons and/or performing implausible stunts. And a lot of the time, these characters were doing the impossible without a superpower in their locker. In that era of star power and outlandish high concepts, a lack of brand recognition was rarely a problem.
