PUTAT wrote:Forsher wrote:I can't remember where I said it but I'll say it again: an audience that lived through an apocalypse (Covid), does not want the apocalypse to be treated as one great big joke. Superhero films have been a bit slow to catch up to this. Which is kind of weird because The Batman should've told Marvel and DC what kind of film to be making years ago.
What? The coronavirus outbreak isn't an apocalypse. A factor in MCU decline is bad CGI.
There are ton of factors that go into it, some completely out of the control of the studio and some in a patchwork of contradictory or just unrealistic expectations from the audience including the tendency for every fanbase to eventually in one way or another turn on its creators. The only counter example I can think of is Jim Henson, but that might be because he died before this really took hold. Maybe Gene Rodenberry but I'm not that big of a trekkie so I couldn't say.
Though to throw another armchair opinion out there as if it matters what I think, it seems to me that superhero adaptations have repeatedly made the same mistake since at least 1966 if not earlier.
The campy Adam West Batman was a huge hit. So why are there only three seasons? Well, pretty early in the run of the series it was such a big hit that they started airing the show twice a week. So from the first season where it was one of the biggest phenomenons and airing twice a week by the third season it was oversaturated and ratings dropped and they turned to gimmicks and cast expansion (giving young me Yvonne Craig in reruns (I'm not that old) so...no notes.)
In the mid seventies CBS and other networks started dipping in the superhero till again with The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, The Man From Atlantis (why it took so long to get Namor, there was a Namor show planned but it was too late in this process), The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, Shazam, Electro Woman & Dyno Girl, a short lived Spider-man that fucked up the rights which is why we didn't get a Spider-man movie until 2002 but also selling the live action rights eventually led to Power Rangers which is crazy, and some others I can't remember. But anyway. Back to Namor, one of the reasons aside from the Patrick Duffy show Namor didn't get picked up was that there was a concern that they were becoming the 'superhero channel' (like the CW was for a bit with the Arrowverse).
Superman the Movie bolstered another gold rush that fizzled faster than most, again in 1989 with Batman followed by Rocketeer and a Captain America so bad they pulled it from theaters before release and the push to generate sequels with only darkhorse winners like The Crow and Blade (which is honestly given way too much credit for the MCU and 21st century comic book movies. Bryan Singer was already in development on X-Men and Spider-man at the time was transferring out of James Cameron's hands due to the aforementioned rights issue.
The Arrowverse is the most recent (outside of the MCU and superhero franchises in general) example of a too rapidly expanding thing collapsing under its own weight.
Because comics as the source medium are designed for this. They all cost exactly the same to produce (unless you've accidentally let your artists and writers become stars instead of the characters) and the concept of the universe is built into the whole deal with comics.
But even then, in the 90s Marvel nearly bankrupted itself by again over producing trying to lean into the emerging collector market with special covers etc (prior to that in the 80s while some comics were crazy valuable I was piecing together the entire run of Ghost Rider about a buck at a time...only to have them thrown away by my dad as is the custom.)
Though it's not comic books, I flagged the problem in Star Wars. For my money, while Solo answered questions no one really had and followed The Last Jedi which faced immediate backlash, I felt the real problem was that Star Wars needed to feel special and if one franchise movie came out just months after a Skywalker movie, it didn't.
Comic book adaptations can get away with it because they share a conceit in the universe but it's a different character and a different kind of story (hopefully, the MCU was at its best when the movies were a hybrid of comic and another genre, like Winter Soldier's political thriller versus GotG's space adventure etc.)
But when there are four of them from one franchise and three from another and five shows not only is everything rushed without that guiding hand that shaped the first entries but it becomes exhausting and then, eventually, cool to be not into this super persistent mainstream thing.
The rest, like how the 'fanbase' can't decide if them being all connected is 'homework' or them being independent 'isn't building a cohesive story' I think are just symptoms of over saturation. If they had kept it to two or three movies a year and one or two series maybe, the universe wouldn't have expanded as quickly but it might have done it more steadily and allowed the audience to breath and anticipate instead of get overwhelmed with work that sometimes (to your point) just didn't look ready.
