The age of the superhero is over
So instead of just posting a link to the opening weekend of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (which is looking to open in the low 110s) I thought I'd just make a post talking about the recent box office of super-hero movies and the fatigue going on with general audiences.
Let's rewind to the far distant past of December 2021. Spider-Man: No Way Home just opened to over 200 million dollars. It re-invigorates movie going among the general public. Grosses at the box office afterwards are vastly higher. Spider-Man makes nearly two billion dollars at the box office. The next super-hero movie to come out is Batman, which does pretty well considering it's the first entry in a rebooted series.
Then, the summer movie season kicks off with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Seemingly, the movie is heading towards a 200+ opening weekend (much like Spider-Man). The film was sold as a follow-up to No Way Home, but in reality it had little to nothing to do with that movie. General audiences caught on, and were overall mixed on the film, so the opening weekend landed under 200 million. The film ultimately went on to gross over 900 million at the box office, but with terrible legs.
The next film after that was Thor: Love and Thunder. Again, the film garners a mixed reception with both critics and audiences. It ultimately grosses less than it's predecessor Thor: Ragnarok (although L&T did not open in China or Russia). It did okay all things considered, but it was another poorly received entry in the franchise.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out in November with much better reception. Although it still ended up dropping 500 million worldwide from it's predecessor (300 domestic). Again, considering this was dealing with the loss of it's star, it did okay all things considered. Still, it was a disappointment compared to what it was expected to make and the critical reception was weaker than anticipated.
Then the big dumpster fire happens. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is released. It gets the MCU's second rotten score on RT, and gets the worst audience reception of the series since Eternals. The film manages to get the highest opening of the Ant-Man franchise, but with terrible reception it also gets the worst legs of the MCU. It ends up with the lowest gross of the Ant-Man movies despite opening higher than both of them.
The GA got burned from a constant flood of mediocre product (and we're not even talking about all the TV shows).
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, despite much better reception than most recent MCU films, is ending up with a lower opening than it's predecessor, and will most likely end up with a lower gross than the first film. This is referred to as "paying for the sins of the father."
This will be the lowest May opener since The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opened in 2014 (not counting 2020 or 2021).
Super-hero movies will still be around, and some of them might make a lot of money, but it's clear the utter dominance it had at the box office for the past 10 years is over. Which is kind of insane to think about how quickly this all came crumbling down (only 1.5 years!). But it goes to show there's a limit to how many mediocre/bad movies the GA can handle in a franchise.
And this isn't even counting how poorly both Shazam and Black Adam did for DC.
It seems like Quantumania might have been the "Heaven's Gate" for the MCU, it was the straw that broke the camels back.
So what will happen with super-hero movies? Probably a return to the pre-Avengers normal. Mainline superheroes (like Batman and Spider-Man) will remain lucrative. But lesser known superheroes are now riskier bets, and if those lesser known heroes are in a bad movie, there's no saving it. Logically, budgets for these movies should get lower to accommodate the lower grosses bound to happen from now on. And there needs to be actual effort put into the film in order to make it a good film first and foremost.
Unfortunately for the MCU, many of the movies slated for 2024 were greenlit before they could change direction (like Captain America: New World Order which went into production a few months ago). The budgets for these films are probably going to be really high like they've all been (200M+) and the grosses will get even lower as these movies were not given proper re-writes to right the ship.
As for DC, it puts a lot of pressure on Gunn to make Superman a good movie. And not just a good super-hero movie, but a good movie. Like how Batman Begins was just a good movie.
Hollywood is now looking towards video game movies as the next big thing, thanks to the massive success of Mario, so these movies are going to have to build themselves back up.
Someone in the other thread posted something along the lines of mostly being uninterested in the latest superhero movies because they simply aren't as good anymore, and while I don't think that's the full picture I think it's a pretty big part of it.
Media these days has a problem with fanaticism; the industry will come up with a good concept, which gets really popular and sells a lot of units, and then they push out so many clones of those things that people get tired of seeing them all the time and they realize that a lot of of those products are not as good as they thought they were at the beginning. In hindsight we see that there were natural variations in overall quality throughout the trend, but at the beginning people were willing to overlook the bad ones because it was still fresh and trending. At the end the low quality ones tank the entire concept.
This is more pronounced in the video game industry, where it has essentially been the biggest part of Activision's strategy for over a decade - see also toys to life, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and plastic instrument musical rhythm games. They get popular, the market gets flooded with them with annual releases from the big guys and clones from competitors, then when the market gets saturated people lose interest and the big companies basically abandon the concept. But it's also a little bit more extreme in that market segment because the games can continue to be just as good as always but the market shrinks too much for the major publishers to care to invest in. Musical rhythm games, for example, still remain a fairly popular genre even without requiring plastic instruments.
I also said in the last thread that I was growing tired of marvel, and to be frank I'm tired of just about every major IP these days. I just want to dive into a good story that isn't part of a larger cannon or universe - and I swear I will scream the next time I hear someone mention the word "multiverse". Intertextuality is just exhausting to me at this point.
Yeah I chalk this up to late stage capitalism, everything is about chasing the newest moneymaking trend these days, it's like a bunch of wall street investors all piling on a stock, once a venture capitalist or production exec sees their kid playing with a toy or watching a superhero movie, they fund the crap out of it until people get burnt out, and then they just move on to the next thing.
In the end it all goes back to squeezing every possible cent of value from an idea or object until you can't anymore, and then moving to the next thing. It's happened with movies, TV, games, hobbies, social media, everything. Any time we have these massive conglomerates with tons of money to burn and their only goal being profit, this is gonna happen eventually. It's just the system. Customers demand novelty, but novelty is hard and expensive, so companies trickle out truly novel content until something sticks, and then they beat that horse until it's corpse is barely identifiable as a mammal.
At this point, I've honestly stopped trying to make sense of it past that or predict it though, since these trends are inherently irrational and simply trying to chase dubious metrics like box office numbers that don't always reflect the actual quality of the product or people's actual interest in it. So we'll always end up with either getting way more than we wanted and being bored of it, or not getting enough and wondering why they didn't go further with a trend.
Is that really a “these days” thing, and is it really a problem, though? You can find that kind of trend following throughout human civilization. And I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that kind of cyclical production.
The modern superhero movie had its golden age, all kinds of ideas and directions in the genre were explored, and now the ones that have legs will stick around. Things like The Boys would never exist without the boom (and by that I mean the TV production - of course the comic existed before, but it’s also worse imo significantly than the show), and I think the media world is better off for it. Just because something declines eventually doesn’t mean it was a bad thing that it started. The sun sets every day, after all.
To be clear I don't think it's new so much as it's at a much bigger scale now. Fads have always been a thing, but they weren't always so richly monetized as they are now. And in the case of media it allows individual companies to nearly monopolize them thanks to IP laws.
I called it a problem but in reality it's a very minor one. World hunger, it ain't. While there are probably a few problems with it if we were to dig deep, it might be more of an annoyance.
absolutely on the same page here. I've really enjoyed new concepts recently: The Menu and Everything Everywhere All At Once being the most notable. I've also enjoyed some continuations of things we haven't seen in a while like Renfield and Bullet Train.
For the biggest untapped multiverse potential, I nominate The Dark Tower. Best part is there is plenty of standalone stories that don't need to be part of a single movie/tv adaptation.
Adaptations of King's work have always been hit or miss, but doing his Magnum Opus justice would be LoTR level chefs kiss.
Little Sisters of Eluria might not be a bad entry.
We got a Dark Tower adaptation in 2017.
No. No we didn't.
We got a steaming pile of Hollywood which simultaneously was uninteresting and confusing to non-fans, and horrifically awful to fans.
Idris Alba doing the creed, and a few of the other visuals taken in isolation, were awesome.
But oy. That adaptation makes The Langoliers seem like a LoTR.
I think it's a little early to ring the bell on the MCU, it's had dry periods before and will remain an institution that defines cinema for years if not decades even if it's not the only game in town. As far as the genre, Marvel is superheroes for a lot of people, and maybe DC will get a cut of that pie, but the mythic hero has always been a crowd pleaser across Action movies, Westerns, Epics and High Fantasy, I don't see that going anywhere, and superheroes are probably the best genre to tell those sorts of stories in at the moment.
I’m gonna bump this to double as a Guardians 3 thread since I just watched it last night. It was great. It’s the best MCU movie since Endgame (might be the only actual good MCU movie since then). And it feels like, not just an end to the Guardians, but an end to the MCU as a whole. The Guardians trilogy is the best of the MCU and Gunn will go down as the best director of these films.
It honestly makes me even less interested in watching anything MCU related maybe ever again. I am definitely not feeling up to the task of watching The Marvels.
On a personal note it had a very strong emotional impact on me. I had really intense flashbacks to watching the first movie on my 15th birthday (I had forgotten that’s what I did that day). And it just reminded me of the passage of time and the fact that everything comes to an end eventually.
I didn't even know there was a third Guardians of the Galaxy coming out.
Most super hero sequels reminds me of the line "God willing we'll all meet again in Spacballs 2: The Search for More Money". Basically saying that most sequels are made only to capitalize off of prior success rather than because they had a compelling idea for a new story.
Yeah, we're not evening choosing to see GotG3 in theaters. That being said, as long as Disney is consistently turning a profit with these films, we'll keep getting them.
Unrelated, but the last movie we saw in theaters was the D&D movie, and that one worked for me. It knew what it was and had fun with it.
Problem is that Ant-Man 3 likely didn’t turn a profit and it might just be the first in the MCU for that to be the case.
This is true, but Guardians is well on its way to profit.
I have very little confidence that DC will become successful in this iteration. The Flash is already a clusterfuck of drama because of its star, and I am actually looking forward to seeing how it fares. And I'm also curious how the GA feels about the reboots. There are so many different actors for the same roles in DC movies of the last 10 years - Batman is on its fourth actor since 2012? If that isn't over-saturation, I don't know what is. So I have no idea what it is DC thinks Gunn can bring to the table that will actually work?
I really like superhero movies but I'm pretty much done paying to see them in the theater. The spectacle was new and exciting to see on the big screen 10-15 years ago, but not anymore. I can wait a month or two for the digital/streaming release.
Superhero movies are going with same problem like comics. The
worldmultiverse is in danger again. Every superhero had to join to save it first time but now they can do it individually. Like Thor, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, even Shazam (haven't seen it but it had dragons basically that) are not needing any help now. They are facing Thanos/Darkseid level threats like nothing. I'm less tired of superhero movies more of same generic plots and jokes. Everyone has nanotech now.We need more grounded and less world ending events. Guardians of Galaxy 3 has no overarching plot connecting to main multiverse plotline. It's just doing its own thing. And it's best superhero movie in recent times. I'm hoping Gunn can do same with DC. He has announced a Supergirl movie based on Tom King's limited series which is absolutely a beautiful story to adopt on big screen. DC needs a long overdue course correction that Gunn can do. I don't see higher and higher stakes just make some good movies. Heroes can come together for a brunch too.
I don't mind the overarching plots - as long as it was actually something new or different. And the multiverse thing got old the first time it was introduced. I haven't seen the new Guardians movie yet but I really do not know how Gunn is going to course correct the DC. They obviously can't afford to, but they ought to just take a break for a few years and then start their new cinematic universe - instead of starting it off with a movie starring one of the most problematic actors in Hollywood.
I'd be glad to be positively surprised but I really don't see how the confusing mess of DC is going to be sorted. Like, which damn Batman is the "real" one now? Which of the 3 Suicide Squad movies is the one that counts? God damn.