Now I for one do like a comic book film, I’m not the only one, so far in 2016, 4 of them fill up the top 10 highest grossing films; Captain America: Civil War; Deadpool; Batman V Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse.
We can expect that list to very likely include Suicide Squad and maybe Doctor Strange as well, by the time the year ends.
This juggernaut of a genre has heavy investment and as such takes its pick from all the actors and directors that it wants.
It should be noted that it isn’t just film but TV, it is now dominating, with shows like Daredevil and Arrow to name just two.
Suicide Squad, next on the list includes Oscar nominees Will Smith and Jared Leto within its cast. It’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be stopping, great reviews and best Oscar for a female performance for Room, saw Brie Larson snapped up to be Captain Marvel.
Ben Affleck, who has directed great original films Argo; Gone Baby Gone and The Town is now looking like he will direct as well as star in a Batman movie. It will be interesting to see what he does, but will it be as memorable as those previous 3? I very much doubt it.
The films being Franchises does mean we will see numerous sequels with those actors/actresses, where wouldn’t we prefer to see them in more different roles?
There are so many of these films now, it’s like they are running out of names to put in them, Chris Evans has done Fantastic Four and Captain America; Ben Affleck has been Batman and Daredevil; Michael B. Jordan is part of the rebooted Fantastic Four but it has been announced he will now be in Black Panther too.
Of course if they are not playing numerous characters, they are playing the same characters in the numerous crossovers these films have. As well as their individual films, we now see Thor; Iron-Man and Captain America be part of the Avengers.
This year, for the first time, we came out of Captain America: Civil War feeling underwhelmed, we felt we had seen a lot of it in the far too many trailers released prior to its release, we liked X-Men Apocalypse, yet if we’re honest we may have had our Jennifer Lawrence blinkers on =)
The genre of course does bring surprises, Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool both felt a bit different, yet as the sequels announced will follow, can they continue to be different?
The genre does seem to know it needs to change with the times with the announcement of female led superhero films in Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are welcome news.
Of course, these big budget mega movies do mean that they dominate so many screens, we have at times found ourselves seeing smaller films as that is all that is left to see and some are unexpected gems so that could be a good thing surely?
For us its just a shame, growing up the summer blockbusters held a lot more originality to them, the heroes came one at a time, we started with Christopher Reeve as Superman, then Tim Burton gave us Batman and then in 2000 it seemed to go crazy, X-Men was first then Spider-Man; Fantastic Four and we came full circle as Batman was rebooted as Batman Begins.
The Nineties highest grossing films did not include one comic book film, unless you include Men in Black (source http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html)
The 2000’s included 3 (Dark Knight and Spider-Man 1 and 2 same source http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html)
Now it will be considerably more, this year we may even get half the top 10 being comic book film, it would likely have been more had there been no talking animal films!
Of course we are maybe being over dramatic, in our blog of 10 we are looking forward to seeing for the end of the year, only one of those was a comic book hero film https://barkingmadaboutfilms.com/2016-3/
What do you think, do you love the superhero films or would you love more original movies? We would love to hear from you here at Barking Mad About Films
Never miss a BMAF blog. Receive email notifications when new posts are published by entering your email address in the subscription box on the top right-hand side of this page.
You can also like us on Facebook for more movie and film related content www.facebook.com/barkingmadaboutfilms/