Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Super Summer


Thorblogpostagain.jpgIf—somehow—you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of superhero movies this summer … and even more in the pipeline for next year.

Thor has already started hammering the box office. But the Norse god of thunder will soon face stiffer competition than his crafty brother Loki from the likes of X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. And while technically not superhero flicks, Conan the Barbarian and Cowboys & Aliens both have comic book roots too. (And if we really want to loosen up the definition, Jack Sparrow and Harry Potter resemble superheroes in quite a few ways, as do those shape-shifting robotic stars of the third Transformers movie—all of whom will be in the mix this summer.)

If that’s not enough for the superhero fanboys out there, 2012 looks to unleash genre heavyweights Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine and the Avengers. Oh, and Nicolas Cage will be back in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, for those really keeping a close eye on the showdown.

It’s not exactly a mystery why Hollywood keeps going back to this deep well. With the advent of a new millennium and increasingly sophisticated CGI technology, superhero movies have become a consistently massive draw at the box office. X-Men got things started in 2000 with a respectable $157.3 million gross. But Spider-Man’s gargantuan $403.7 million haul in 2002 really amped up expectations for what a well-told superhero tale could do. Next came Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, the Batman reboot that rewrote the rules of the genre yet again … and made off with $533.3 million along the way.

I think it’s safe to say that no other genre (if we broaden it a bit to include its fantasy and sci-fi cousins) reliably generates hundreds of millions of dollars each year—a fact that’s not lost on Hollywood’s bean counters.

Some, however, are beginning to wonder whether the superhero craze is, because of that, becoming boringly boilerplate.

In his scathing review of Thor, New York Times critic A.O. Scott calls the predictable beats in the plot a “programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.” He also says of the trend in general, “At this stage in the superhero bubble the strategy seems to be to protect the investment by minimizing risk. And the biggest risk would be a movie that dared to be interesting or original in its exploration of archetypal characters and their allegorical predicaments. That has been tried from time to time and with some success (in the second Spider-Man and X-Men films and yes, I’ll admit, in The Dark Knight as well). But the norm in this genre is a hodgepodge of adolescent emotions, cheeky humor, cool special effects and overblown action sequences, a formula that can, when the casting is right, make certain specimens (like the first Iron Man movie) seem better than they are.”

Fans of the genre might think Scott’s going a bit hard on it. After all, it’s the very hodgepodge of elements he mentions that results in such broad appeal. And at least one significant player in the superhero scene thinks there might be some deeper influences at work too.

In a lengthy interview with The Washington Post, former Marvel Comics chairman Stan Lee (and co-creator of many of Marvel’s best-loved characters) offered his take on the massive appeal of superheroes. “I’m not a psychiatrist,” the 88-year-old mogul said. “All I know is, the good superhero movie has got action, suspense, colorful characters, new angles—that’s what people like about the lasting appeal of superheroes.” Then he added, “My theory about why people like superheroes is that when we were kids, we all loved to read fairy tales. Fairy tales are all about things bigger than life: giants, witches, trolls, dinosaurs and dragons and all sorts of imaginative things. Then you get a little bit older and you stop reading fairy tales, but you don’t ever outgrow your love of them. … Superhero movies are like fairy tales for older people. All those things you imagined—if only I could fly or be the strongest—are about wish fulfillment. And because of that, I don’t think they’ll ever go out of vogue.”

Personally, I think both of these arguments have merit. On one hand, even as someone who grew up reading comic books, I’m sympathetic to A.O. Scott’s argument that Hollywood is less interested in telling a good story these days than it is in using spandex-suited supers as box office bait. It’s a strategy that, as Scott says, seems to be paying off handsomely.

And yet there’s a good chance I’ll be begging my editor to let me be the one to review X-Men and Captain America later this summer … for exactly the reasons Stan Lee pointed out.