Did the Superhero Movie Era Mean Anything?
‘Supergirl’ is the first new comic book film in 11 months. Let's take a moment to reflect.
Welcome back to Projections, the landing area for a grounded comic book reader recovering from four decades of arrested development. In today’s newsletter, we will look at the era of movies that effectively defined my adult life and arguably set the movie business back about a decade.
But first, I wanted to thank Nick Catucci over at Embedded for featuring yours truly in the My Internet column. Please enjoy the fruits of my addled internet usage.
So I saw Supergirl. It will come as little surprise to engaged contemporary movie lovers that it isn’t any good. We’re discussing the movie at length on The Big Picture this week and doing an autopsy of this moment in comic book movies. But I’d like to take a long view of the subgenre here.
If we use 2000’s X-Men as the launch point and 2002’s Spider-Man as the realization of a long-held dream for multiple generations, that gives us roughly 25 years of movies to look at. A lot transpired over that time—multiple presidential administrations, foreign wars, a global pandemic, vast technological shifts. When it all started, there was no social media, no smartphones, no such thing as the “fandom” space. They survived and thrived through it all. In turn, these movies have covered the industry, the art form, and the discourse in a sticky, weblike film that, long after it’s dried up, we can’t seem to clean off.
Supergirl is the first time I was certain about it being over. Before I become too dramatic with overstatement: I don’t believe movies based on comic books are dead, going away, a pox on society, or a net negative culturally. But I do think that their dominance has had a harmful effect on the subcultural world I cherish and that a recession would do the stories themselves and the movies at large a service.
