Feb 7, 2023

Superhero Fatigue: a rant

 Is Superhero Fatigue real? Maybe. Is Disney to blame? Partially. Is Warner Brothers to blame? Partially. Noticed something? The owners of the big two Comic Book complanies are the main culprits of Superhero fatigue. Mainly because they have been the ones churning stuff of different quality. 

Smaller companies like Image and Dynamite Entertainment have gotten into the game as well, but their products are direct to streaming in order to avoid competong with the big two at the theaters.

Disney is to blame because they ARE oversaturating the market.

Phase 1 was 6 movies in roughly 4 years.
Phase 2 was 6 movies in roughly 2 years.
Phase 3 was 11 movies in roughly 3 years
Phase 4 was 7 movies, 8 TV series, and 2 TV specials in roughly 2 years. I'm still going through Hawkeye and haven't seen Moonknight yet. I still need to see the GOTG Xmas special.

I know that mathematically speaking phase 1 was roughly 1.5 movies a year, phase 2 was 3 movies a year, phase 3 was 3.7 movies a year and phase 4 was 3.5 movies a year, 4 tv series a year, and 2 tv special the same year.

While "almost 4 movies a year" doesn't sound THAT big, it is kinda big when less people are going to the movies. According to Statista, a survey made in the US between April and May of 2022, 41% of folks rarely go to the movies. 18% said they NEVER go to the movies, while 8% said, they'd do it often. 33% of the folks going semi-frequently. I suppose that a post COVID world and inflation being some of the factors causing the increase of folks reducing from semi-regularly to rarely going. 

Now that I dealt with Marvel/Disney, I must mention the Occasional SONY Spider-Man related Garbage and the amazing Into the Spiderverse. While these don't come as often, they're "MCU adjacent" and they cam pile up. 

Now to look at the Wanker Buttholes who manage the Distinguished Competition.
11 movies from 2013-2022. I'm not counting the non-canonical Long turd, because it's not canon.
Theu had barely 1 movie per year, but it wasn't the quantity, but the quality of the movies what hurt Audiences. 

Let's start by stating the obvious: Zack Snyder hurt the superhero genre with his multihour perfume ads. Play a perfume ad at .25 speed add Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and you have the Zack snyder experience.
I used this and laughed my ass off, because of how silly it felt, but I also love Drakkar Noir. 
Or you can take a random screenshot from a Snyder Movie and turn it into a perfume ad. His controversial and divisive takes on DC's superheroes divided the fanbase and exposed the darker side of fandoms with his toxic Snydercult sending death threats to WB and DC execs, boycotting and review bombing non-snyder WB movies.

But then there's also WB themselves, who give directors "free-reign" on the movies until they decide to butt-in and meddle. While in some cases, their meddling is a good thing, in others not so much. I mean, thanks WB for removing over 30 minutes of Jared Leto as Joker.
But fuck you WB for meddling with Burton's Batman 3. Not to mention fuck you for hiring Snyder in the first place. The mess that Gunn and Safran have to clean up now was in great part, your fault WB. Trying to speedrun the DC equivalent of Marvel's phases 1-3 in 3 movies that kinda worked as deconstruction of DC characters. Instead of quietly shutting down after JL, the Aquaman fluke caused WB to drag the DCEU corpse without Batman, because AFFLECK QUIT DUE TO HIS MENTAL HEALTH. Without Superman because reasons. My guess is that Cavill received too much flak thanks to Snyder's mishandling of the character and also being "the face" of the Snyderverse.

Then we have the spectrum of bad movies like BVS or Theatrical JL (the 4 hour version is worse... it's 4 hours long) we have OK movies but weren't well remunerated like Shazam or The Suicide Squad. And we have the What where they Thinking!? Movies like Suicide Squad, birds of Prey and the ridiculous and pretentiously long title involving one Harley Quinn, and WW84. Then we have meh movies like The Rock refuses to wear pointy ears and a wig that would make him look like early 2000s The Rock because he doesn't want to fight that jabroni Shazam and wants to defeat Superman. Then we have great movies like AquaMomoa and Wonder Woman. 

With Disney oversaturating the market and WB throwing everything but the kitchen sink hoping to catch lightning in a bottle on a sunny day and no bottles; we can see where the fatigue kicks in. Then we have the Snydertards hijacking everything to promote their current "only Snyder can do DC" crap.

To this day, I haven't sat down to watch Black Adam. I barely sat through Wakanda Forever completely and I'm dreading its follow up, Wakanda and Robin... Ironheart was disappointing, El Niño SiN amor was OK. 
But the movie was meh. I hated the circle jerkoff with killing T'Challa because Chadwick Boseman died, yet other characters die and they get replaced by Han Solo. Hell, Eternals has replaced Gladiator as my go to sleep movie.

I won't say that we're in full superhero movie fatigue, but we're getting there. 
We need some diversification of content... Fantastic Four is more about a family of explorers whose experiences are closer to Star Trek than normal superhero shenanigans. It doesn't lend itself to the standard MCU trope of Hero faces a person who is essentially a warped copy of the hero.

X-Men would have a lot of politics, due to the whole mutants and discrimination they suffer.
We also need more Street Level heroes, which we're sorely lacking. Not everyrhing needs to be this huge big assed event that somehow is self-contained despite the situation being big enough to make the audience question: "why aren't the Avengers helping with this?"

On the diversification thing, it seems that DC MIGHT have an advantage, since Gunn's plan seems to cover that. The question is if he will stick the landing.

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