The marvel of it all: Superman is dead. Again. Or is he?
Is our fascination with cinematic superheroes kaput? Or is ‘The Marvels’ just a bad movie?
Early this week entertainment industry news featured headlines about the opening of the new Marvel Comics Universe superhero action movie, The Marvels. Dominating the stories was a stark, unpleasant fact, at least for MCU executives: the movie, though managing to be the top-grossing film of the weekend (against some generally pretty mediocre competition, it must be said), brought in only $47 million, thus setting a record for an MCU theatrical release: the lowest opening weekend take ever. The previous holder of this undesired record: Incredible Hulk, which garnered $55 million from its opening weekend in 2008. This doesn’t fully reflect the level of disappointment with the take of The Marvels, however, since a correction for inflation indicates that the equivalent opening-weekend earnings for Incredible Hulk here in 2023 would be about $79 million. The IMDb rating average for The Marvels sits for the moment at 6.1, tied for last amongst MCU movies with another 2023 release, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. At Rotten Tomatoes, The Marvels gets 62% on the Tomatometer, more or less equalling the preview scores of another major release opening November 16 (tomorrow as I write this), the high-minded toy doll vehicle, Trolls Band Together. The movie that brought in the second-highest gross last weekend (a measly $9 million), Five Nights at Freddy’s, has a Tomatometer score of only 32% and IMDb rating of 5.2. As I said, the competition was, generally, mediocre.
The reviews for The Marvels have not been kind. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, in an article with a headline declaring “You’ve seen this movie 32 times before”, bemoans the production: “…it’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is…” in spite of the director’s talent, an appealing and capable cast, and a “scene-stealing orange tabby” named Goose. On finishing reading the review, one feels like just after a meal of disappointing Chinese food: it wasn’t exactly bad, but certainly not to be raved about, and you’re gonna be hungry again by the time you get home. Michael O’Sullivan’s review in The Washington Post is headlined, “The Marvels Does Not Live Up to Its Name”, and he tells us that the movie “progresses turgidly and mindlessly” before giving it 1.5 out of five stars. Bruce Miller, reviewing the film in the Sioux City Journal, gets to use the phrase no movie producer ever wants to read, “To make matters worse,…” en route to informing us that “To her credit, DaCosta (Nia DaCosta, the director) gets [the film] wrapped up in less than two hours.” So, it might be bad, but at least it’s not too long.
Above we mentioned that now the two MCU movies with the worst IMDb ratings averages are two released in 2023: The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Is it just coincidence that these two are the two of more than thirty MCU films that audiences like the least? Or might there be something else at play?
I remember when I was a skinny little kid tramping through the woods to the 7-11 store on the far side, with a couple quarters in hand, enough to buy the latest Captain America comic book and a Snickers, or a bottle of Coke. Captain America, Superman, and Spider-Man were my Big Three fictional superheroes. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I didn’t think of them as fictional. The same was true, I think, for many other kids. We wanted to believe that there were super-heroes out there somewhere, protecting everything good, fighting off the bad guys, upholding justice, and just making our world safe.
Eventually, my friends and I moved on. We grew into the world, and both learned, and to some extent became inured to, its ways. The allure of the comic book superhero receded into memory, from whence we would on occasion wistfully recall Captain America and The Falcon saving the world from disaster at least once a month.
Then we found their impressive replacement: Special heroes arose on film, presented with special effects and special stories and special, super powers. The Star Wars movies opened the door to a new era of superheroes, courtesy of The Force. Right on the heels of the first Star Wars movie came Superman, in essence a ‘reboot’ of a familiar story, but made new. Both franchises were very successful, and spun off, directly and indirectly, myriad others: Spider-Man. Star Trek. Batman. Etc., etc.
The world took them seriously, and fantastically, in most every sense. Even to the point where “Jedi Knight” was sometimes declared as a religion. Very often as a joke, sarcasm, or similar, but not always. Of the nearly 400,000 people in England and Wales that claimed “Jediism”, “Jedi”, or “Jedi Knight” as their religion on the 2001 census (making it the fourth-largest declared religion, ahead of Sikhism and Buddhism), surely some of them were serious. Two such individuals underwent the typical Piers Morgan bullying on Good Morning Britain in 2017:
Okay, now might be a good time to pause for a sanity check. That’s hard to do, though, when here in the U.S. people are claiming deep devotion to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and alleging that they are serious adherents of Pastafarianism. I think they’re serious only to the extent that they are trying to demote religion from what they see as its completely unwarranted, possibly even harmful, special position of status and privilege in society, but when people start insisting on getting their driver’s license photos taken whilst wearing a colander, even going to court to attain the privilege of doing so, I throw my hands up. As a perhaps reassuring note, it seems the number of Jedi adherents in the UK has plummeted, more or less coinciding with Brexit, though I make no claims about cause or effect. From a high of somewhere a half-million, in the 2021 the number of people claiming a significant relationship with midi-chlorians crashed to less than 2000.
Maybe it’s just that we’re all a little nuts, and fighting to maintain a grip on something we can call understanding, sanity, a reason for being, or whatever it takes to get us through the day. And the superhero movie phenomenon that has blossomed over the last few decades has slotted nicely into openings on the fantasy shelf of our minds, doses of pleasant, self-affirming, positive neurochemical-releasing myth and magic.
Friederich Nietzsche, every college nihilist’s idol, described as one possible path for dealing with the death of the deity he said was then a done deal the becoming of an Übermensch—often translated as “Superman”, though if one wants to get maximally gender-and-sex-sensitive about it, “Super-human” might be better. Although any claim to understanding of Nietzsche needs to be framed in the context that even Nietzsche may not have understood Nietzsche—he was peripatetic, at least, in his philosophical thought and writing—the basic idea of the Übermensch is that of an ideal human, freed of the flaws, weaknesses, and shortcomings of all previous humans. It turns out to be much like a Platonic ideal of a human: one which, it turns out, doesn’t exist, but which can be seen in our myth-making, story-telling, wishes, dreams, etc., like the flickering shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Thus, becoming a Superman is an impossibility. Gott ist tot, and Superman was never alive.
Might it be that, societally speaking, we’re slowly recognizing that our most recent superhero myths—in some cases, actual Superman myths—are no more than that? That Ironman isn’t gonna show up to save the day, Captain America is just a skinny kid with big ideals, and Superman lives in a world apparently broadly seasoned with kryptonite. If so, perhaps we’re bored, and in need of a deep retranchement of the old stories, and replacement with new and better.
Or maybe The Marvels, like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is just a bad movie. Maybe both.
Either way, or both, I think we’re now turning towards the myth-makers in Hollywood and beyond, asking, “So, what else ya got?”
“So, what else ya got?”
ROTFL... Absolutely perfect.
Perry- The amount of deaths and rebirths in the superhero world can be tricky to keep track at times. So this is a refreshing find, and a reminder that I have much to catch up on.