The comic
book movie bubble is expanding, and we all know what happens to bubbles when
they finish expanding. From 2002’s Spider-Man, or perhaps even earlier with
1998’s Blade, audiences have lapped
up gloriously OTT tales of heroism and the impossible. There have been lulls and duds, with the
likes of Daredevil (2003), Ghost Rider (2007) and Catwoman (2004), but more overwhelming
successes than failures with D.C. and Chris Nolan leaving an indelible
bat-shaped mark on cinema before Marvel decided to try something big with their
Avengers initiative.
And in
expansion there is a problem. Marvel
started with one character, Iron Man, facing a relatively minor and contained
threat. They had the vision (ok, pun intended there) and ambition to combine
their roster and develop crossovers between them. Other characters were gradually introduced
and connections established between them, and within four years Iron Man had became Avengers Assemble with a whole team of characters and interstellar
threat. Huge success and massive profit
followed; it was a justified commercial hit and really satisfying to watch, having
stayed with the project throughout the whole build up.
So where
does Marvel go from here? Expansion? More characters? For every surefire hit like Iron Man 3 or Age of Ultron, they throw in a Guardians
Of The Galaxy and Ant-Man. They’re still building towards something and
ultimately this will lead to a change in the structure of the films. So far there have been fairly standard
unilateral heroes leading their own films, with the occasional team up. Eventually, Marvel will be entering realm of
the ensemble film more and more often.
It is easy
to get these things wrong: with too many characters, somebody always gets short
changed, plots become unfocused and enemies become unthreatening in the face of
so much power on the good guys’ side, and when all this happens you lose sense
of drama. The three recent Fantastic Four films struggled to
balance four characters and keep the whole thing interesting (yeah, they didn’t
struggle, they failed), but the biggest offenders have been the X-Men films. From 2000’s X-Men to this year’s bloated but fun Apocalypse, characters are routinely given almost nothing to do,
with Oscar winners like Halle Berry and Jennifer Lawrence shelved in favour of
Wolverine. And they now face the problem of where to go now that the heroes
have prevented somebody literally destroying the world. Once the team is made, it’s hard to un-make.
Stand alone films would be a risk on the back of under-developed characters,
and would prompt quite sensible questions like “why don’t the rest of the X-Men
come to help?”
The problem
is that with too many characters, we don’t get enough time with anyone to care
about them (hence the reliance on Wolverine), and many are reduced to being a
power rather than a person. The
benchmark for this is still Avengers
Assemble, but this had the advantage of Marvel’s long game planning. The Assemble
audience already knew who everyone was, their characteristics and power
sets, and this left much more time for fall outs, conflicts and flashy ways of
dispatching alien invaders: the fun stuff.
As superhero ensembles go it’s perfect, and only really approached by
this year’s Captain America: Civil War
(which again benefits from pre-established characters).
I’ll make a
sweeping statement and say that D.C. are playing catch up with Marvel, who
gambled first and proved that this superhero lark is highly lucrative and they
want to make hay while the sun is still shining, before cape fatigue inevitably
sets in. Marvel have trusted their
creatives to do their thing (although Edgar Wright may disagree with that),
leaving enough connective tissue between films and TV shows to keep it all
together. D.C. have already ruined their
chances of emulating this by separating small screen Arrow and Flash from
their cinematic counterparts, and are betting everything on their films. Chris Nolan’s Batman films were so
successful, but detached from any other D.C. properties, the studio couldn’t
resist checking the utility belt for more money and re-introducing him into
their project.
They don’t
have time to do this like Marvel did, and they know it. D.C. are therefore disadvantaged by two things:
their major characters have existing cinematic baggage, which needs to be shed
for audiences to accept new versions; and too many new characters to introduce in
a really short space of time. Multiple
Batman and Superman franchises mean that while audiences already know the
characters, they have to hold up great big signs that say WE’RE STARTING OVER!
so people don’t get confused and say “Didn’t Batman retire at the end of The Dark Knight Rises?” They also have
to establish unknown (to non-geeks) characters like Aquaman, Cyborg, Flash and
eventually Shazam.
As if to
illustrate my point (not really – I wrote this after watching the film), D.C.
have had a go at introducing several characters in one go with Suicide Squad, and the results were…
less than super.
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