Why the Fall of Comic-Book Movie Culture Is Inevitable
30.12.2023 - 19:45
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Comic-book movie culture didn’t just stumble this year. It face-planted, giving us one movie after another that fans didn’t much care about and that the corporations backing these films took a disquieting loss on. And that’s not how it was supposed to go.
According to the Gospel of 21st-Century Hollywood, the words “comic-book film” and “box-office disappointment” are not supposed to appear in the same sentence. When they do, not just once but over and over and over again, the tea leaves are telling us something ominous and maybe definitive. Why, in 2023, did this happen? The analysis that has mostly been offered is simple: The movie companies served up mediocre superhero product.
That’s why they — and we — suffered. If it had just been one or two duds, the situation might have been explained away. But when you think back on “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “The Flash” and “The Marvels” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” the pattern is clear.
It’s not simply a Marvel thing or a DC thing. The primal thrill and popularity of comic-book movie culture took a major hit, and it may be fading away. And yet… In the very drubbing these movies received, at the box office and in the drumbeat snark of critical reviews, you might say there’s hope.
Comic-book movie culture is, after all, only as good as the movies it gives us. And this was the year that the corporations — let’s name names: Disney and Warner Bros. — failed.
They made bad movies. What if they’d made good movies? The temptation to point a finger at the producers and executives and vilify them for their shoddy product has always been there. But now it’s part of the new couch-potato rebel culture.
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