When some superhero movies began to be released as blockbuster movies, it seemed like a good idea to me at the time.
Why wouldn't they do it? The question seemed to me at the time was why hadn't they already started this trend earlier?
Specifically, the first real blockbuster superhero movie that I can remember was "Batman," which was released in 1989, if memory serves correctly.
Of course, there had been some superhero movies before then, most notably the Superman movies starring Christopher Reeves. Also, the Incredible Hulk, with Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby. Surely, some others that I am not remembering, or perhaps even aware of.
The Spiderman movies of the 2000's still felt welcome to me, and I pretty much enjoyed them.
However, superhero movies began to take a darker turn after the release of Ironman in 2007. At that point, it seemed that they just started to take over. Before long, other movies simply could not compete with the big money making monsters that the superhero movies had become.
By the mid-2010's, they began to feel overwhelming. It seemed like there were new superhero movies coming out every few months at most. And they were crowding out other, potentially very good movie ideas which did not happen to have any associations with superheroes.
This became glaringly obvious with the release of one of the best superhero movies (actually, kind of an anti-superhero movie) in 2019, with "The Joker." It was actually more of an artsy, intellectual film, only disguised with superhero associations. But the guy who made it did so because he felt that he could not get any support for a movie that did not feature some kind of superhero or, in this case, a supervillain for superheroes to fight.
At a job some years ago, I knew a guy who was a few years older than me, and who had no tolerance for any movies that were not action-packed, with some kind of explosions and other great special effects seemingly every minute. One movie franchise that he seemed to think was great was the Transformers, which I thought were among the worst movies that I had seen. It felt that there was almost no storyline, and that what passes for a storyline was merely a means of getting to the real draw, which were the seemingly endless amounts of CGI explosive special effects, one after another. That a grown man - again, he was older than me, by then in his mid-forties or so - would almost proudly proclaim that he could not bear to watch a movie that was not filled with such mindless violence and special effects, lest his attention waver for the briefest moment, was a major turnoff. That was about the time when I began to make a conscious effort to limit the number of comic book movies that my son and I went to.
It actually reminded me a bit of when I began to go see some sports games, particularly NFL football, when in my twenties. I had wanted to "make up" for lost time, when going to a game felt like an almost inaccessible privilege. Once I started going and seeing how many - probably even most - of the fans were, it dawned on me that this was not the way that I wanted to be, not how I wanted to live my life. Seeing this guy - and other similar guys who might not have expressed it as outright as this, but who also filled their lives with tons of similarly mindless action movies and video games, which similarly have taken over as a frankly immature form of entertainment, particularly for relatively young men, and especially for those often described these days as "incels" - was an eye opener. It feels like all of these things, far from the lively and, on the surface, engaging stories that they are advertised as, actually has the opposite effect, and lulls the minds of the viewers (or gamers, when it comes to video game culture) to sleep. Indeed, I know some people - I'm talking about grown men here in their thirties and forties - who have literally almost no tolerance for real world things. They want to get back to the escapism of comic book movies and/or video games as quickly as they can. In some cases, they recognize that there lives feel unsatisfying and dull. Yet, the addiction of returning to these things is so strong, that they don't recognize that, indeed, these very things which seem to make them happy, or at least keep them distracted, might actually be preventing them from obtaining more out of life.
Nowadays, the release of yet another superhero movie generally is met by a certain indifference by me. There are some which I enjoy and still might look to see. But generally speaking, with my son now pretty much almost a grown man, the days of us going to a new Marvel or DC movie that he highly anticipated are done. I will try not to go to the theaters to see any more superhero movies.
As a society, it seems to me that Martin Scorsese is right. Enough is enough with the comic book movies. Let's bring movies that can add beauty and which might actually require a little thought back into cinemas.
Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.” Now 80, the legendary director is on one of the most creative runs of his career— and consumed by the challenges (and opportunities) of all that he has left to do. By Zach Baron September 25, 2023:
https://www.gq.com/story/martin-scorsese-profile?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=gq&mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR1HCWqgCyUALKIhT2uFQkOx2v6aqzc_v0RJuCE6neeO1ZN1kWKGMUPnryI
Martin Scorsese: Filmmakers Like Christopher Nolan And The Safdie Brothers Are Leading The “Fight Back” Against Comic Book Movie Culture By Zac Ntim, September 25, 2023:
https://deadline.com/2023/09/martin-scorsese-christopher-nolan-safdie-brothers-comic-book-marvel-1235555382/
Martin Scorsese Urges Audiences To "Fight Back" Against Comic Book Films “We’ve got to save cinema.” by Joyce Li Sept 26, 2023:
“We’ve got to save cinema.”
https://hypebeast.com/2023/9/martin-scorsese-urge-audiences-fight-back-agaisnt-comic-book-films?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=facebook_post&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1NE5IeHl16UmgMUzDgBJZ65Hs7u6-u3Y9es0eeSTBNnmjppqyro-K8gpg#Echobox=1695714287
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