Adapted from: https://www.bbc.

com/culture/article/20230330-superhero-films-is-this-the-end-of-the-road
By: Nicholas Barber

Superhero films: Is this the end of the road?

A combination of grim headlines and poor box office numbers means that the colossal success of the

superhero franchises could be a thing of the past, writes Nicholas Barber.

Superhero films aren't looking too super. Jonathan Majors, the American actor, was arrested last

weekend and has since been charged with assault, and although his representatives have declared that

he is innocent, the US Army has temporarily shelved the recruitment adverts in which he appeared.

That puts the Disney-owned Marvel Studios in an awkward position. Majors plays Kang the

Conqueror, who wasn't just the villain in the recent Ant-Man film, but is meant to be the main baddie

in the next wave of Marvel blockbusters. Should he keep the role? And what about Ezra Miller? They

were charged with a series of crimes occurring last spring and summer, but have the title role in DC's

The Flash, which is due out in June. Are viewers supposed to forget about the grim headlines and

pretend that everything is fine?

Obviously there are more important things to consider than box office takings regarding these

allegations, and the two actors' alleged behaviour has nothing to do with the films they're in or the

studios that make them, but they do deepen the impression that superhero cinema is not what it was –

that some kind of Kryptonite is sapping the strength of a genre that once seemed unstoppable and

indestructible. So far, this year's two superhero releases, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and

Shazam! Fury of the Gods, have both underperformed at the box office and received grudging reviews

(47% and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively). Nor did this decline and fall start with them. An

article published by Screen Rant on 1 January was headlined, "2022 Was the Year Superhero Movies

Lost Their Box Office Dominance". It was the year when DC's Black Adam bombed, despite starring

Hollywood's highest earner, Dwayne Johnson, and the year when Sony's Morbius became a social-
media joke, bombarded by mocking memes and going on to "win" two Golden Raspberry awards. If

you compare them with the year's two biggest hits, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water,

they look like scrappy, derivative B-movies rather than the mighty tentpoles we have come to expect.

What went wrong? Well to answer that question, it helps to remember what went right. Superhero

films had been hits before, but they became a phenomenon in 2008, when The Dark Knight topped the

annual box office chart, and Iron Man was in second place. Despite that ranking, it was Iron Man that

was the game-changer because it launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Under the sharp eye of

Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios' president, the company kept introducing fresh, fun, charismatic new

versions of classic Marvel comics characters, such as Thor and Captain America. One by one, these

characters crossed over into each other's films, so that each individual mega-budget spectacular also

functioned as an episode in an ever-growing epic. Audiences were hooked and cinemas were packed

with superheroes.

Perhaps the genre was over-valued because Marvel was doing so well. Even during the gold rush years

of the 2010s, there were plenty of superhero films, such as Fantastic Four and Green Lantern (anyone

remember that?), which took commercial and / or critical drubbings. But in general, comic-book

blockbusters seemed to be soaring to ever greater heights of popularity, peaking with the starbursts of

Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). These films brought all of

the MCU's many characters together, concluded its decade-long overarching narrative, snuffed out and

restored half of the universe's population, and wrote out two fan favourites, Robert Downey Jr's Iron

Man and Chris Evans' Captain America. They made billions of dollars – but how could the company

possibly follow them? No one at Marvel seemed to know.

Running out of steam

One factor is that the Covid-19 pandemic slowed momentum, closing cinemas a year after Avengers:

Endgame was released. (And how could any made-up global threat compete with that real one?) But

another factor is that the next MCU films, those in its so-called "Phase Four", were enervated and

purposeless: the hangover after the wild party the night before. Black Widow (2021) was essentially

one long flashback, focusing on a character who had been killed off in Avengers: Endgame. The dreary

Eternals (2021) proved that Chloé Zhao, fresh from her Oscar win for a low-key documentary-style

drama, Nomadland, probably shouldn't direct effects-heavy blockbusters. Thor: Love and Thunder

(2022) was an inferior rehash of Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) had to make

do without its titular hero, following the death of the man who played him, Chadwick Boseman. Shang-

Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) innovated by incorporating so much Chinese culture, but

it still followed a template that had been used too many times. A sequel is reportedly "in development",

but no release date has been announced.

The MCU had been revolutionary because, up until Avengers: Endgame, you had to see every film in

it to fully appreciate all of the others. But now you could skip them without missing anything in

particular. In fact, the films felt less important than WandaVision, Loki, and the rest of the Marvel

television series on Disney+. And if the most interesting superhero action is on TV, why bother paying

to see its poor relation at the cinema?

Not that this was just a Marvel problem. Every superhero franchise is now weighed down with the

baggage of earlier films, so a genre that used to be about the exhilarating thrill of forward motion is

no longer going anywhere fast. For the viewer, it's getting difficult to remember who is in the Avengers,

who is playing the Joker, whether Wolverine is alive or dead, and whether Venom is in Sony's Spider-

Man Universe or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or some other universe altogether. Superhero films

now seem to have more of a past than a future. They're exhausted, and so are their viewers.
One issue is that the studios are simply running out of beloved characters. It's true that several actors

have played Spider-Man over the last two decades, but Iron Man and Captain America are so closely

associated with Downey and Evans, the actors who made the parts their own, that it wouldn't work to

recast them now. So who are we left with? Marvel Studios is reaching the bottom of the barrel with

The Marvels and Thunderbolts, while Sony is planning films around such Spider-Man B-listers as

Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web. Maybe Marvel and DC comics weren't the infinite resource they

once promised to be, after all.

Still, we shouldn't get carried away. Last year, there were four superhero films in the worldwide box-

office top 10 – five if you include Minions: The Rise of Gru. Spider-Man: No Way Home was the

highest grossing film of 2021. And I, for one, am looking forward to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-

Verse in June. Beyond that, James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, has been

given the job of relaunching DC's superheroes with new actors and a new approach. The genre could

still make a triumphant comeback, as the characters in its stories so often do. But will it ever again

engender the excitement that those first Marvel films did? That really would be a superhuman feat.

Believe it or not, the term "superhero fatigue" was already being bandied around back in 2011. In

2023, cinemagoers everywhere know how it feels