Two decades ago, Walt Disney Pictures and director Joe Johnston gave audiences The Rocketeer, an action movie based on a cult-favorite comic book created by the late Dave Stevens in 1982, set in 1937 Los Angeles. It was a flawed but wonderfully energetic movie that boasted some slick period sets and costumes, some solid performances by Bill Campbell as the title character whose alter ego was down-on-his-luck circus pilot Cliff Secord, Timothy Dalton as his nemesis, a luscious Jennifer Connelly as his love interest and Alan Arkin as his mentor, mechanic and father figure, visual effects by renowned F/X house Industrial Light and Magic and a propulsive music score by future Avatar composer James Horner.
The problem was, apparently the filmmakers hadn't counted on the fact that most of the people who didn't read comic books (and even quite a number of people who did) really didn't care much for Cliff Secord and his adventures, and the movie was a box-office dud. Speaking for myself, I had major problems with its visual effects, particularly the flying ones, which, thirteen years after Richard Donner's Superman first flew into movie theaters, looked grotesquely unconvincing, even when compared to the work of that much older film.
There was, however, a lot about that film that I liked (I have the soundtrack, in fact), not the least of which was the 1930s setting, which the filmmakers wholeheartedly embraced. I felt they were on to something there.
With X-Men: First Class, the first film of the series set in the 1960s, having done decent business at the global box-office, and with Captain America: The First Avenger, also directed by Johnston, set in 1942, and apparently set to do better than decent business, I wonder if the time has come to look into making more of them.
Of course, the problem with Hollywood is that when it comes to making certain kinds of movies, it's kind of like strip-mining; they don't stop until the whole genre has crashed and burned and scarred the public consciousness for years to come. It was like that with disaster movies, with audiences finally saying "no" when Warner Brothers and Wolfgang Petersen remade The Poseidon Adventure in 2006. But the thing about genre filmmaking is that, unlike strip-mining which basically involves exploiting a non-renewable resource, it only takes one good film to get the genre going again, which was what happened when 2000's X-Men revitalized the comic book movie scarcely three years after Batman and Robin nearly killed it.
The thing that makes period-comic-book movies an idea that might be worth considering (especially if Captain America makes decent bank) is that like Captain America and the X-Men, most of the truly well-known comic book characters like the ones whose adventures are published by Marvel or DC comics were actually created back in the 1940s, 50s or 60s. Placing at least some of those characters in period-specific settings would in some cases imbue their stories with the socio-cultural flavor that characterized the first appearances of these characters, and actually give them an internal logic they might not otherwise have.
Of course, I'm glad they updated Iron Man and Spider-Man rather than setting them in the 1960s, but to my mind the X-Men's filmed mythology became that much richer for its throwback to the historical milieu in which the book was created, with the Civil Rights movement only just beginning. I'll have to reserve judgment on Captain America: the First Avenger till after I've seen it, but if the buzz is to be believed, apparently the period setting truly enhanced the storytelling as well.
Period pieces have proven bankable time and again, with the four films of the Indiana Jones series, the setting of which varies from the 1940s to the 1950s, and the four films of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, which take place sometime in the late 18th century or perhaps the early 19th century, all making significant amounts of money most film producers would kill to have their films earn. Even recent period fare, like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, have been eagerly embraced by audiences, which goes to show how marketable period films, even those which aren't dead serious and angling for Oscars, can be.
A lot of comic-book characters, even the ones who've been updated over the years, could arguably benefit from period-specific treatment. Luke Cage, who basically looks like a bouncer masquerading as a superhero these days, walking around in nondescript jeans-and-t-shirt ensemble with a shaved head, is a good case in point. Admittedly, his yellow-shirt-and-tiara setup may be a little hard to carry off on screen, but a film that pays solid tribute to his origins as a product of blaxploitation, complete with period-appropriate music and costumes, could potentially have more narrative heft than a generic, hip-hop, "gangsta" movie which could very easily get lost in the shuffle of movies about dance-offs, rap-offs and drive-by-shootings, many of which go straight to video. It could have an American Gangster vibe to it.
Doctor Strange, long rumored as the first Disney-produced Marvel film (with Patrick Dempsey reportedly chasing the role), actually owes a lot to Steve Ditko's funky, psychedelic visuals, which would feel pretty much at home, I imagine, in a 1960s milieu as well.
The list could go on, really; DC comics' heroes are even older than Marvel's, so there's a bit of potential period goodness to play with right there, not to mention all of the other comic book characters created in the Golden and Silver Ages of comic books or comic strips who sort of fell by the wayside. Maybe if characters like the Shadow and the Phantom had been treated with a little more reverence, their filmed adaptations wouldn't have done as badly as they did.
Heck, if this next version of Superman fails to fly the way Bryan Singer's quasi-sequel failed, maybe they could think of rebooting it again, but this time setting it in 1938. Just a thought.
Personally, I'd love to see more comic-book movies get made, even though most of the big ones I was looking out for have already been done, with only a handful left that I'm really pining for, but in a market where superhero films are starting to feel generic, with audiences and critics claiming "superhero fatigue" maybe a little subverting of the genre is in order.
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