Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No… it’s another superhero movie. With the announcement of Spiderman’s imminent integration into the ludicrously profitable Marvel cinematic universe, now seems as good a time as any to assess the state, or rather the prevalence, of the superhero movie. In fact, there are around 30 superhero movies, based on DC or Marvel comics, which are slated to arrive between now and 2020.
But why is the superhero market becoming so oversaturated? The simple answer is, as is usually the case in Hollywood, money. There are four superhero movies that have made over a billion dollars, and 2012’s The Avengers (entitled Avengers Assemble in the UK) still stands as the third highest grossing film of all time. The Marvel cinematic universe has in total grossed over $7 billion worldwide, and with the upcoming slate of phase 2 and phase 3 films in the pipeline at Disney, they show no signs of slowing their momentum.
But why has the superhero movie become such a cash cow? One answer is the economic concept of vertical integration. Superhero franchises such as X-Men, the Marvel cinematic universe or the elusive DC universe are composed of multiple franchises. The Marvel universe alone consists of the Iron Man series, the Thor series, the Captain America series and others that have either been launched or are set to launch across the next few years. Marvel has even crossed into television with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter, which promise to rake in cash for years to come. The potential for profit from a team-up movie such as The Avengers, which can draw in fans of each character’s respective franchise, incentivises film studios to make bigger and more diverse spectacles out of a genre that has become the blockbuster tent-pole.
So why is oversaturation a problem, if there seems to be a reliable audience for these films? Well, first there is the homogenising effect of the multi-franchise universe approach. The Marvel movies are necessarily tonally indistinct from each other, so that it doesn’t seem odd when Iron Man and Thor duke it out on screen. Man of Steel, Warner Brothers’ misguided attempt to launch their own cinematic universe, suffers from a subdued gritty realism, supposed to accommodate the inclusion of Batman at a future date – a character that Warner Brothers is relying on to sell their cinematic universe in the follow up to Man of Steel which is, tellingly, titled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The appeal of superhero movies is that they offer both spectacle and escapism. To be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, to be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound: the superhero movie is a kind of power fantasy, an escape from human frailty or vulnerability. But what do we escape from if every superhero movie is the same? Recent efforts to shake up the style and feel of these films, notably Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, are considered amongst the best of their franchises, and the gritty realistic take of Nolan’s Batman trilogy was enough to dislodge the sour taste of the campy Joel Schumacher films of the 1990s. But now, ‘gritty realist’ superhero movies and ‘fun spectacle’ seem to be the only two genres into which superhero movies fall.
Now that Kevin Feige will probably be producing every other movie coming out of Hollywood, the only question remaining is at what point will audience’s tire of the superhero genre? As of right now, the studios producing these films have no reason to change the formula, and will have no reason until they stop making money. But when they do need a change, they are lucky to be operating in a genre that has endless scope for reinvention, the recasting of young actors in the X-Men franchise standing testament to this.
For now however, superhero movies are going to stick with what works. Marvel will continue to produce movies that are tonally indistinct; DC will continue to replace the lead characters of their films with Batman and Sony will continue to reboot Spiderman. Well, maybe not everything works.
