Today on the 5: I came across an opinion piece over on Polygon talking how Deadpool & Wolverine signals the end of experimentation in superhero films. While I agree with many of the points made in the piece, I'm not sure a lack of experimentation is the problem we cirrently have in superhero cinema.
Ozone Nightmare
Experimentation Or Moderation?
Welcome to daily five for Wednesday September 11th, 2024 I came across an opinion piece over on the video game centric website polygon titled deadpool and wolverine bids farewell to the experimental super superhero movie era and I'll link to the article of course read the article and largely agree with some of the points or most of the points that the author is making about how we have seen a well I don't know exactly if we've seen less experimentation in superhero films but we have definitely seen more more things produced that are clearly aiming to be as safe as possible somewhat of a byproduct of two things on the marvel side the acquisition by Disney Disney not really being known for taking a lot of risks and on the dc side I think that's a byproduct of the fact that dc was intentionally or not experimenting quite a bit when they were trying to figure out how they could copy marvel's formula and they couldn't get it right and they kept just doing different more and more different things to try to figure out how to duplicate the marvel's success and when that has failed they have I think largely pulled back on that as marvel has but I think in marvel's case it's I don't think any of this to be honest is due to a lack of experimentation I think we've seen experimentation all the way through it's never been that much of it but that's been I think that's largely been true of everything generally if if you look at video games if you look at movies if you look at music anything else once there is a formula that is being recognized as making money short term long term doesn't even matter what you are often going to see is that anybody producing anything in that space they are going to be reluctant to go outside of what they see as the way that it works unless there is some kind of demonstrated value that they're missing out on and even if you can somehow say well there's this amount of money you're leaving out they will want to see that demonstrated before they're going to commit to it so I don't know that we really have seen an end to experimental filmmaking in the super superhero space I think it's just that right now what we are seeing is the same problem that we've seen again in many other media which is an over saturation of the same way of doing things in the same ways so if you think back to if you're old enough when the boy band and girl band thing came up in the 2000s there were there were points where boy bands and girl bands were just being mass produced and they were almost interchangeable in many cases people got them confused and of course that genre burned itself out because there was just too much of it if you look at video games I talked about concord as many other people have and said well the problem with that is not that it was a live service game because some people will say that I don't necessarily agree that that's the problem but that it didn't do anything different it was simply another live service game as we've seen Ubisoft had this same problem when they were cracking out Assassin's Creed every year people started to get secret because every year you'd get basically the same game in a different setting but without enough things that were fundamentally different to make you energize to play it and so of course people sit there and go well if I've got an 80 hour Assassin's Creed game from a year ago I'm still having finished 60 percent of it I'm just going to keep going on that and I'll get to the other thing when I get to it and it's been the same thing with these types of films superhero films in particular we've gotten so much of it not only in theaters but also now in the streaming experience so even if what I think they were still making too many movies but on top of that now you have series that many cases were made at least in a high quality in terms of what they looked like and the people involved they were getting the same stars as the movies to be in the series well at some point you sit there and go okay you know what I kind of need a break I've seen some variation of this multiple times in the last six to twelve months and honestly it's just like you can't eat the same doughnut every day for your entire life and not get bored of it it's the same thing with movies or any other form of entertainment there's a point where you need some space to be able to relax to partially forget the movie that you just saw so that when a new one comes around say a year from now or two years from now you're excited for it again you want to see it because it's been a while when you literally can go three months before you're gonna see another movie that's very similar the one that you just saw it doesn't become that exciting anymore so I don't think that what's going on here is a problem of experimentation lack of it or too much of it I think it's a problem of moderation in that there isn't any we're finally starting to see some of it only because the monetary returns have demanded it not because anybody got wise to that but I think whatever it might have the same beneficial end result where we actually get to breathe a little bit between these movies and then forget about them partially so so I don't think the problem with superhero movies is a lack of experimentation I think it's a lack of moderation later