Amph Superhero Overload?

This is the thing that's bizarre about your posts. You are trying to tell us what "audiences" in some strange, generic abstract, will or won't find similar. You do this even while dismissing direct evidence that they find these films similar. Your arguments are largely semantic. By making a distinction between "surface genre" and (actual, I suppose?) genre, you purport to disprove any sort of fatigue. By relabeling common story-telling elements as, variously, "plot structures" or "specific plot points" or several other things--please note I haven't jumped into this ever-expanding phylogeny--that things that aren't similar won't be recognized as such.

None of it is real. You don't have any actual grounding in any of your writing. What evidence do you have that people are actually perceiving things as you claim? I've shown you specific examples to bolster my points. And you know what? If a bunch of movies require the hero to beat up the villain in physical combat in order to end the movie, that's a similarity across the several movies. If all films have the same points unexplained, that's a similarity across several movies. Calling them something different doesn't erase that. Things are similar because they are similar, not just because you call them the same thing.

 

Pointing out general similarities is just as vague and nebulous as what you claim Quest is arguing, Wocky.

 

I would argue that while any one is particularly vague, the repeated recurrence of virtually all of them is quite specific. I'd say, further, that even if I'm wrong in particulars, I don't think you can say my concept is off. Supporters, detractors, and I'm fairly certain even Marvel itself admits that the Marvel superhero films have a distinctive flavor to them. That's really all my argument depends on, and is only a stretch in that it tries to include other studios superhero films to create a broader trend. But that's much less of a stretch intellectually than trying to claim that these films don't have any common vibe.

Further, I did try to anchor myself with on piece of hard evidence. I feel comfortable talking about these as similar because in the reviews of superhero films like "Man of Steel" the primary point of comparison was to other superhero films. This shouldn't really happen if these sorts of stories didn't remind people of each other. If it was really seen as primarily a sci fi disaster invasion film, why weren't there a bunch of reviews referencing War of the Worlds? I would say that people's reactions speak for themselves.

 

Let me try to demonstrate. Have you ever seen a fairy tale? They can be pretty widely diverse. Disney in particular has spread them across time, space, and even species. We have seen wide variety of characters from all sorts of backgrounds participants. Literal royalty, small business owners, outcasts, animals, children and magical beings. Each in their time has been a part of one of these romances. Often times, these "relationships" are extremely rushed, and unrealistic. Though the idea of love at first sight is sometimes encouraged explicitly, they much more often try to imply a naturally developed relationship despite only a few days or hours worth of interaction.

Does that honestly make sense? No. Of course it doesn't. You could call this just a "plot hole" or say that people who take issue with this are complaining about "execution." But that would be entirely wrong-headed. The makers of these fairy tale romance stories didn't just keep doing this by accident. This was a deliberate part of their methodology. It was a conscious part of their story-telling.

Or consider Terrence Malick. All of his films have tremendous, beautiful cinematography, long run times, and a tendency towards meandering plots. The camera lingers over things. Moments stretch out. There's almost nothing of his where you can't see how it easily fits into his body of work. Likewise, if you're watching something whose director you don't know, you can pretty easily guess if it was made by him, or at least someone that shares a similar style. All these points, in there strengths and weaknesses, are what you would deem technical. They certainly have nothing to do with genre. Because, truly (in a way that the films you are trying to defend never are or could be), a period piece about early exploration of the New World, a multi-generational family drama, a romance film/perfume commercial and a WWII film are all very different in genre and tone. But they all bear his distinctive, indelible mark. Someone watching them in sequence could pretty easily comment that they are tiring of the Malick style, and want something different. People in fact complained that the perfume commercial came too soon on the heels of Tree of Life. Is this all just about "execution?" It isn't. They are what Malick is aiming to achieve, deliberately. Whatever you call them, these are the elements that define Malick's style, and they are recognizable, and they can for that reason be tiring.

Something similar is happening here. These movies don't just keep having the same suite of strengths and weaknesses over and over again as a matter of happenstance. It's not as if they really mean to create a substantive, coherent villain but happen to run out of time on every movie. This is part of their method. The villain--and more broadly the plot--of these superhero movies is incidental, it's almost just a McGuffin that allows them to showcase their main character in a big stupid battle scene. They don't put a lot of effort into any of them, and that lack of effort shows, over and over, in the way that they rarely make sense. The distinctions you are building are false. "Structural" elements as you choose to call them, can be just as deliberate a part of film as anything else. They can be just as easily recognized, too. And, most importantly, they can just as easily create fatigue.

 

And fairy tales are probably not genres either now, eh? It's just a "storytelling style". Sagas are not a distinct genre of literature. They're just a disparate conglomerate of works of fiction that happen to share the same traits in subject and narrational style. Is that right?

 

A few points: the point was not to compare the fortunes of Marvel to Bond directly, the point was to illustrate the absolute unprecedented insanity of Marvel's release schedule. The most prolific major film franchise in history took fifty years to make its twenty-three movies. Marvel will make twenty-three movies in thirteen years (if it stays on pace). This is a deluge of franchise production unlike anything else in history. Nothing has ever saturated the market to the degree Marvel plans to. If you want to project the future of the genre and of the franchises, you have to consider the fact that nobody has ever dumped anything remotely like so much product into theaters in so short a time.

But anyway, the comparison works in my favor, as a series that doesn't have ongoing plotlines is easier to hop on and off of, and thus less prone to building itself up to burnout. When Avengers 4 is building itself off Avengers 1-3, Iron Man 4, Captain America 3, Thor 1-3, Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr Strange 2, and The Hypothetical Hulk, it's a lot harder for the audience to stick around than when James Bond shows up for another adventure.

And maybe consider the diminished spy genre when we're talking about genres diminishing. Bond was huge in the sixties. Bondmania. Bond movies came out every year for most of the sixties. It spawned a whole genre of imitators and spoofs . . . and then eventually the public hit saturation, the culture changed, and the public moved on to new kinds of action movies and thrillers while the spy genre cooled down. Spy movies weren't blockbusters anymore (and the Bond series tried doing the sort of "genre variation" thing Marvel is doing to tap into whatever was big at that moment -- it didn't really work, except for when Moonraker tried to tap into the Star Wars boom, and even that couldn't save the series). The series still hasn't matched its heyday. There was a wave, it crested, the wave didn't last. No doubt, people at the time thought the wave would last forever then, too. It didn't. There's no reason to think that superhero movies are going to be any different from any other flavor of the decade. We have not arrived at the end of history. "At last, we've found the one form of cinema people will never get tired of no matter how many we churn out! This is what a century of filmmaking has been building to!" The current dominance of superhero movies may last another decade, another fifteen years, or it may bust in five with a few high-profile duds. But eventually, its time will pass. There will be a decline.

 

I'm just glad we're back to talking about something other than narrative dissonance.

 

Regarding the spy genre dying off, and Bond-mania in particular, one HUGE aspect isn't mentioned.

The Bond franchise was firmly grounded in real world politics. This gave it an added relevance, but it also tied it intrinsically to the times. Man from UNCLE, Mission Impossible (the original series), Bond, just about every Frankenheimer movie he did, etc- were all "spy genres." They all related directly to the cold war and played on the worry about mutually assured destruction from an evil world power. Sure, these examples added cool gadgets, and substituted megomanical villains for countries, and so on. But when the cold war was won, the entire spy genre became moot. Or rather, the genre had to evolve into something slightly different.

However, instead of comparing Marvel movies to James Bond, one can compare two British franchises to see a major difference between the two. Compare James Bond to Doctor Who.....The 1st episode of Doctor Who aired the year after Dr No was shown in theaters. (1962 vs 1963) Doctor Who isn't grounded in the real world, and it isn't dependent on real world paradigms. And if you consider that each serial story arc is really a movie length story, then Doctor Who's 800 episodes are probably the equivalent to 200 movies, filmed over its span of 50 years, not just 23 films. Sure, Doctor Who had a period when it wasn't being produced, but for the most part, it's just as strong, if not stronger 50 years later. Doctor Who has no real world metric beyond what it self defines within its own genre.

Marvel Comics movies have a similar benefit. Ant-Man has very little elements in common with Captain America, which has very little in common with regards to the Guardians of the Galaxy, and so on. It's simply the film equivalent to how the actual paper and ink comic books are published. Yes, audience fatigue is more of a danger if the Marvel world was dependent on just a couple of characters. If the year was 1982, and all anyone had to look forward to was another Superman movie, ala DC/Warner, then this might be a different matter. But Marvel hasn't even scratched the surface with what it has available within its own universe. Sub Mariner? Machine Man? Morbius the Living Vampire? Power Pack? Dazzler? The Invaders? The Defenders? Each is unique within its own story line even as each is contained within the larger genre of comic movies. But more importantly, each delivers a different "flavor" to the audience. I'm not saying that each one would be a colossal blockbuster, but I think the way Marvel is currently handling its universe will go a long way to hold off fatigue, more along the lines of how Doctor Who is handled.

 

I think introducing a bunch of other movies with not-yet-used superheros from either Marvel or DC could still lead to a form of burnout in the larger viewing population at some point. Instead of saying "really, Iron Man 8?", people could be left saying "really, another superhero movie with yet another superhero? Who is this guy?".

 

Hmmmmm ... I'm not sure that I'd call DW going from strength to strength when it was cancelled (call it on hiatus if you must) for 14 years or so -- and one might note it remained in hiatellation for another few years even after a failed attempt to refire it with the McGann telemovie. At the very least that would suggest DW wasn't pulling sufficient popularity in ratings to justify its continued run, which itelf is a symptom that it had fallen out of fashion. Not to mention that some of the criticism aimed at why the Madman in a Blue Box left our continuum for over a decade was that it shifted genre from light science fiction to science-fantasy. One might note that there is still a pretty marked difference in style, plot, theme, and subject matter between the old, first few series of the Who and the series after it was restarted. It didn't help that it was marked for death by one of the BBC's executives, of course, but I'd still call DW more a parallel with Star Trek TOS and Star Trek TNG than a continuing demand for the same stories as such.

 

I think introducing a bunch of other movies with not-yet-used superheros from either Marvel or DC could still lead to a form of burnout in the larger viewing population at some point. Instead of saying "really, Iron Man 8?", people could be left saying "really, another superhero movie with yet another superhero? Who is this guy?".

Yeah, I suppose this is true with anything. I suppose it matters how one defines burnout though? Decades Later? I'm not sure this is how the public collectively thinks. If it were true, then there wouldn't be any science fiction after Buster Crabbe played Flash Gordon in the 1940's. There wouldn't be any cop shows after Jack Webb portrayed Sgt Joe Friday in Dragnet. There shouldn't be a Twilight, because Bela Lugosi already portrayed Dracula back in the 30's.... But there are. It's not like anyone would watch a re-run of Sonny Crocket in Miami Vice and then watch an episode of Vic Mackey in the Shield, and say, really, another show with a police officer....Who is this cop? Yeah, both sit within the "cop genre," but both represent completely different things.

Burnout happens when there are no more compelling stories to tell about a subject. From 1978 to 1987, Superman, and Superman alone represented the totality of the "superhero" genre. But not only that, specifically the Christopher Reeve version of Superman was the genre and vice versa. There wasn't even any variation in that. Why pay money to see Superman IV in theaters, when you can see a much better movie for free with Superman I? (or back in those days, a low cost rental.) That's burn-out. Superman went from "You Will Believe a Man Can Fly," to "Who is that blond dofus he is fighting now" by Superman IV. The problem is that under the old licensed studio way of thinking, the studios had to milk the properties they licensed for every penny they were worth, and concerns with the genre itself came second.

But that reality also didn't stop Batman from being insanely popular just 2 years after Superman IV, because Batman was compelling again. That's my point. At no point did any audience sit back and say "eh, Superman IV stunk, who is this caped Bat guy now? It must be all the same..."

Then the Marvel Comics Company/Disney realized that if they could produce their own source material, then they could control the overall genre within their world instead of milking one property and then moving onto the next. Moon Knight is not Iron Man. Luke Cage is not Spider Man. The New Mutants are not the Fantastic Four. In essence, by assuming control of their own properties instead of licensing them out piecemeal, Marvel studios can provide the superhero versions of Joe Friday, Steve McGarrett, Sonny Crockett, and Vic Mackey all within the same universe and each with their own appeal. Smallville picked up on this. Arrow is picking up on this. This is what is going to go a long way to diminish fatigue with the genre. Sure, once the stories are told, then genre fatigue is going to set in. But it's not really fatigue/burnout if it takes a couple of decades to achieve, it's called a successful run.

This was more my point with the comparison with Doctor Who. Even during the years it wasn't on tv, the good Doctor kept his iconic status in pop culture. I wouldn't call that burnout. Yeah, maybe Star Trek TOS and TNG are better comparisons, but Star Trek is an even more appropriate comparison to the Marvel movie-verse. Because even if one sets TOS aside, it took 2 decades for the universe set up in TNG to run its course and reboot. So, when it's 2030 and all the Marvel movies have been told, it will be perfect time to release the reboot of Iron Man.....I'm not sure I would characterize that as burn-out.

 

All I know is that when we start using Rob Liefeld drawings for character art? That's where the films die.

 

That much is true.

 

Team America crossover?

 

Superman and Supergirl were the only two to have mainstream theatrical presence prior to the first Batman film, but there were television series and TV movies before and afterwards. The Superman films fell because the quality declined, while Batman succeeded and then failed because of the quality. You are definitely right in that burnout was never a factor other than in terms of quality, not quantity.

It is possible that it might set in, but then again, it might not. There is no guarantee unless the quality is inconsistent enough. Westerns slowed down a lot, but many will cite that the modern action film is essentially the Western set in modern times. In that situation, the Western was popular for a long time because it was a more recent experience. Roy Rogers and John Wayne became the faces of the Western genre about forty years after the times had changed. It was still real.

As to Marvel as a whole, it was Stan Lee's mission in 1975, to get all of their properties out there for the world to see beyond the comics. In 1998, that mission statement was revisited by Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad when they made their proposal to purchase Marvel and bring it out of bankruptcy. Ike had said to then owner Ron Perelman in 1995, that if they didn't start making movies and television series, Marvel would have to file for bankruptcy. Sure, Disney is backing them now, but before, it was the main guarantee that they stay in black.

 

That's kind of what I mean though D_R... Batman, Superman, Supergirl (in the same universe as Reeve Superman) The examples mentioned still revolve around a couple of tent peg properties and they didn't support each other in any way. Even when Lois and Clark came a couple of years later when no one was doing Superman, it was still Superman. How many different ways can you alternate between a couple of characters and expect the audience to care? And even then, these were still popular.

But instead of simply having Superman 1, 2, 3, 4...imagine back in 1978 if Christopher Reeve was doing Superman, plus there was New Gods Sci-Fi Superhero series where Superman might make a guest appearance (or at least get a character mention) off of Earth, plus there was a Dr Fate superhero version of the X-Files, plus The Question murder mystery, and a Sgt Rock WWII action drama, all with the possibility of them all sharing screen time in the same movie once every couple of years to solve some problem that each one couldn't on their own. This would go a long way to overcome burnout. Audiences wouldn't say "oh no, another superhero"- they say "hey, this one really interests me.." Now, I'd wager that some would be more popular than the others, but it's what I meant when I said above- "Marvel studios can provide the superhero versions of Joe Friday, Steve McGarrett, Sonny Crockett, and Vic Mackey all within the same universe and each with their own appeal."

 

Indeed. The plan to make "Batman Triumphant" was in place by September of 97, with Harley Quinn and the Scarecrow down as the villains and Robin and Batgirl not being included. It was only a year later that the whole thing was shelved and in 2000, talk of doing something different began.

 

When is Captain Picard Day?

 

I hope there's an Ambush Bug film.