It seems like the heyday of superhero movies is coming to an end. Look at the highest-grossing movies of all time and you’ll find twelve of them in the top 50. Thirteen, if you count The Incredibles 2. Ten of those are Marvel movies, and yet the last hit of this size Marvel has had was Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. A number of superhero movies in the last few years, a genre have flopped miserably, including Quantumania, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Black Adam, and god help us, Morbius. Word on the street is that people don’t really want to see more of them – they’re whispering about ‘superhero fatigue’.
I, personally, have never been a superhero movie fan. In general, I don’t like action movies. I find the majority of them formulaic, I am not interested in loud noises or explosions, and I find the whole experience of watching them unpleasant. I prefer my leading men brooding and sad, working against their trauma, not wielding machine guns and mowing down terrorists or whatever. I’ve also been very vocal about my general distaste for Marvel movies and cinematic universes, especially the fact that Marvel fans don’t think critically about the movies they’re being spoon-fed, and that cinematic universes have essentially become marketing tools for all the other movies entangled within them.
However, I know people like them, and I myself have found things to love in a few of them. Despite the fall-off of the superhero movie genre, there are a few gems that seem to seize critics and audiences with their earnestness and honesty. Many talented, smart members of TheGamer have written about how Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was great, but have also speculated on where the MCU can go from here and if there is, indeed, anywhere to go. For a lot of Marvel fans, the franchise is losing its appeal, and DC barely has a leg to stand on as it is without the added issue of people simply not wanting to see more superhero movies.
James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and soon to be head of the DCEU, said something I found quite revealing about this so-called superhero fatigue – it doesn’t really exist. To Rolling Stone, Gunn said, “I think it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes. It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character.” He’s exactly right, and it gets to the heart of what I and others find unappealing about superhero movies and action movies more largely. These films can be all spectacle, lacking any compelling storytelling or any soul at all. I found Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness surprisingly good, because I’d seen WandaVision and I think Wanda Maximoff is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most interesting characters. She’s powerful and hot, of course, but her story is also centred around pain, selfishness, and redemption.
Genre cinema excels when it’s grounded in a good story. I’m a big horror movie fan, and I think A24 has revolutionised the art-horror sub-genre in the last decade by proving that horror grounded in emotional truth and good storytelling could be just as good as Oscar-bait dramas. Hereditary is one of my favourite films of all time, because it’s a complex family drama at its heart, and Gunn says he saw Guardians as a “space opera” and a “family drama”. We’ve seen extremely well-received story-focused superhero movies in the past, like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies and James Mangold’s Logan. These movies don’t have to be thematically dark to be good, but they have to actually resonate with audiences instead of bombarding them with special effects and CGI. The superhero genre is oversaturated with absolute nonsense, but that can change – audiences just need to stop eating up everything they’re served, no matter how bad it is.