It's like there is some kind of, I don't know, fatigue about the genre?
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
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I'm starting to realize that, even if they say otherwise, superhero movies are more limited than Westerns in reality.
In the first case, the protagonist will always have to solve a problem by applying a certain amount of violence. There is always a confrontation with a hostile antagonist.
But in westerns, you can tell about a massacre that lasts the whole movie or just an old man sitting on the porch on his farm thinking longingly about his youth.
And the same at one point, about westerns, people said, "No thanks, that's enough."
In the first case, the protagonist will always have to solve a problem by applying a certain amount of violence. There is always a confrontation with a hostile antagonist.
But in westerns, you can tell about a massacre that lasts the whole movie or just an old man sitting on the porch on his farm thinking longingly about his youth.
And the same at one point, about westerns, people said, "No thanks, that's enough."
Movies, maybe, since studios tend to force superhero movies into a narrower range of story types than you can get in comics or television, like origin stories, revenge stories, and stories that culminate in huge action set pieces. But that's not an intrinsic limitation of the genre, just a failure to take full advantage of its possibilities. I don't blame superheroes for it, I blame movie studios' limited understanding of them. (Which is why the MCU has mostly been more successful than other studios' efforts, since Marvel is a studio founded by the comics company to make movies based on its comics, while other superhero movies are just part of the output of their studios. Even DC Studios is a division of Warner Bros.)
Really, I'd argue that's usually the case -- "fatigue" is not the fault of a specific genre so much as the fault of the sameness that settles into the execution once the studios think they've figured out a successful formula and pressure filmmakers to conform to it. Studio execs have never understood that the key to success is not a specific set of ingredients, but the skill and innovation with which they're executed. So when something is a success due to being fresh and daring and different, they try to churn out a hundred formulaic copies of it.
You can. But you can also make a superhero movie that bucks convention.
The Specials. No villain. No confrontation.
Well, they are very, very rare
Well, they are very, very rare
The same goes for any genre. People always want to argue that category determines quality, but that's obviously wrong. Studios assume category determines quality -- the success of the Barbie movie has already got them thinking about a ton more toy-based movies rather than more movies where filmmakers with distinctive voices and visions are given free rein -- and that's why so many movies fail. It's never the category. It's always how well it's executed. The majority of movies in any genre, about any subject, will be bad. But good filmmakers can make a good, successful movie in any genre, even one that audiences are supposedly "fatigued" by. All it takes is a fresh approach, and free rein from the studio to be creative. The problem is that the latter is so rare. And studio execs want us to blame it on genre rather than blaming it on them.
Probably.
That is what happened. There's only so many times filmmakers were able take basic story tropes of the Western genre to spin, shake or reimagine (as seen in the "revisionist" Western period) before it became that aforementioned blur. Studios were not about to take a truly divergent path--try something new--adding full-on fantasy to the Western movie. In fact, it was Eastwood's Malpaso Company that broke that ground with High Plains Drifter, but said ground was paved over in that film's wake. The rest of the genre was business as usual, making viewers ask, "Anything new?", with studio output providing a firm "No."
The 21st century superhero movie genre reached that point. It is not so much a case of "Well, we've adapted every key or most popular storyline from the comics, so what do we do?" as much as its a case of failing to understand that continuing story formats such as comic-book superheroes only thrived when the occasional sparks of new, creative life took the superhero genre in new directions (new as in good, not just new for the Hell of it). You're never going to see that kind of new direction in this largely empty, assembly-line approach to superheroes with so very few exceptions.
How many moviegoers are expecting something completely fresh and different in the MCU's Kang / Secret Wars build from the Thanos arc? The DCEU had their Darkseid arc (unfinished), but the early reports have Gunn trying to build his DCU up to some eventual, major event (in superhero speak, that means big battle). Again, rinse and repeat, and there's little doubt it will do anything to stave off audiences' superhero fatigue.
It's like there is some kind of, I don't know, fatigue about the genre?
I don't think it's superhero fatigue as much as it is franchise fatigue.
Look at how many supposed blockbusters like Fast and Furious, Indy, and M:I did at the box office as opposed to movies like Mario, Barbie and Oppenheimer, which, according to some, were all supposed to underperform.
Fun fact: in the Italian version, they removed every reference to supernatural elements. He just comes to the village to avenge "his brother". I found only years after that the main character was supposed to be a ghost or something like that.
Ouch, Blue Beetle looks to be opening lower than Shazam Fury of the Gods did:
Deadline: 'Beetle’ Still Eyes $25M; ‘Strays’ Goes To The Dogs With $8M+ – Saturday Box Office Update
https://deadline.com/2023/08/box-office-blue-beetle-strays-barbie-1235522235/
Deadline: 'Beetle’ Still Eyes $25M; ‘Strays’ Goes To The Dogs With $8M+ – Saturday Box Office Update
https://deadline.com/2023/08/box-office-blue-beetle-strays-barbie-1235522235/
You'd only have to remove the last shot, right?
Are you referring to the graves?
The scene remained. The next day the stranger leaves and outside the city he meets Mordecai who is writing the name for the grave of Sheriff Duncan killed by the three. Mordecai wants to know the name of the stranger (who had never told anyone) and he replies that he is writing his brother's name ("Sheriff Jim Duncan rest in peace"). Then he rides off and disappears over the horizon.
How was it? It's a great cast, but I've been burned by that before.
So the only thing different was the audio of what Clint said to Mordecai?
It was alright. Better than the Murphy one. It had some good laughs
I thought that was The Scarlet Pimpernel? Or did he not wear a mask?
Marvel might have started that way, but I believe it's just as much a part of Disney now, as DC is of WB.
Yeah, the majority of the big movies have been underperforming for the last couple of years at least, so what's happening now isn't unique to superhero movies, it's happened to movies in general. And when there have still been some superhero movies, like Across the Spider-Verse, and GOTG Vol. 3, that have pulled in fantastic numbers.
He was the first dual-identity hero and a direct inspiration for Zorro, but no, apparently there was no mask, or so I'm told.
Also, Zorro's mask in the novel wasn't the familiar domino mask but more of a full-face black bandana with eye holes. The 1936 Zorro movie The Bold Caballero is probably the closest screen depiction, though the Republic Zorro serials used full-face masks of various types. The domino mask version originated with the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie and was codified by the 1940 Tyrone Power version.
From a business standpoint, perhaps, but creatively Kevin Feige still seems to be in full control.
Yup. Blaming it on "franchise fatigue" is just falling back on an old cliche that doesn't reflect the post-COVID (or still during COVID, really) world. People got out of the habit of going to movie theaters, and it's just not as popular now as it used to be, so the movies that do really well are a smaller subset of the whole.
What studios need to do is stop banking entirely on hugely expensive tentpole movies that fail unless they're megahits, and make more reasonably budgeted movies that can succeed with more moderate attendance. Part of the problem is that movie budgets have gotten so ridiculously bloated that the standards for success have become unreasonably high.