As I write this, three of the top five movies at the global box office are films based on Marvel Comic books, two out of the three of them produced and released by Disney's Marvel Studios, with the third, the sequel Spider-Man: Far From Home, being produced by Marvel Studios through a deal with Sony Pictures. Sony may have taken the lion's share of the money for Far From Home, but there's little doubt as to whose input was responsible for generating that money in the first place.
If I were to step back in time to 1989, when Tim Burton's Batman ruled the box office while the best Marvel could come up with at the time was Howard the Duck, and direct-to-video movies featuring Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher and J.D. Salinger's son wearing rubber ears as Captain America, and tell my despondent 14-year-old self of what the future held, I would definitely not have believed myself. I especially would not have believed the yarn that with only three movies, Marvel Studios have made FIVE BILLION DOLLARS in a single year. Of course, in real terms, their success is as beneficial to me as the construction of a Trump Tower would be, but as shallow as this sounds, there really is something gratifying somehow about knowing that I loved Spider-Man and all of those other characters "before it was cool" as the cliche goes.
I mean, I laughed out loud when retired tennis star Andy Murray's mother described him and his brother as "tennis geeks" basically appropriating a word that had once described people on the fringe to describe a couple of out-and-out jocks, who in general are the OPPOSITE of what geeks are in terms of societal integration. Such is the degree to which geekdom is the new normal, and how Marvel superheroes have pretty much captured the cultural zeitgeist.
Such is the stranglehold Marvel has on culture that critics of their approach to filmmaking just sound ridiculous as they shout themselves hoarse. There's something hilarious and hypocritical about how more "old school" fans of film decry superhero films (often targeting Marvel films in particular, seeing as how they're at the forefront of this wave) as bad for cinema in general while pining for such the return of old chestnuts like Westerns, which are not only often culturally-stunted but which could be every bit as vapid and formulaic as the very worst that the superhero genre has to offer. It's even funnier how many of these detractors have been trying for years now to predict the demise of superhero films and a return to the "good old days," whatever the hell those were. Before Marvel exploded, the movie landscape was dominated by overpaid movie stars, formulaic action movies and insipid romantic comedies. Having grown up with movies of the 80s, 90s and 00s, I can recall quite clearly that the cineplexes weren't exactly some utopia full of life-changing thinkpieces and indie gems. Heck, a brain-dead comedy like Home Alone and its virtually identical sequel managed to make a killing at the box-office back in 1990 and 1992, and for years during those decades, people like Meg Ryan made a killing playing the same person over and over again. And don't even get me started on the turkeys for which the likes of Demi Moore and Brad Pitt were inexplicably paid eight-figure salaries.
If nothing else, Marvel and other franchise movies have done the filmgoing community a favor by pretty much killing the star-driven way of making movies, and for that alone, I am immensely grateful to them.
My cup has run over several times. That said, and while I do look forward to their future films, I really hope to see them exploring different ways to tell their stories.
I honestly don't think Marvel have a problem of variety when it comes to their approach to scripts and stories. I absolutely loved Black Panther's approach to realpolitik as well as the glorious 70's-paranoia feel pervading Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for one thing. They know they can't just get by doing exactly the same thing over and over again, but there are some tropes that they tend to lean on a little too heavily, like computer-generated imagery and their almost ubiquitous humor.
As much as I defended The Winter Soldier's massive CGI climax featuring three Helicarriers crashing into the Potomac River (which I still think made sense in the context of the story) the more I think about it the more I would have appreciated a climax more in keeping with the movie's nicely grounded and gritty approach to storytelling. Not every climax has to be the epic battle we saw in Avengers: Endgame. In fact, moments like Endgame's battle become all the more special when the CGI is used sparingly.
To perhaps cite a better (or worse) example of why Marvel should probably scale back on CGI use, Black Panther had some really exceptional production value, including a solid script, vibrant cinematography, art direction and costume design, and a catchy, involving music score, only to have it compromised on many occasions, including during the climactic battle, by some truly awful CGI. Of course, some of their more fantastical movies will continue to need CGI, but I sincerely hope that as Marvel Studios enters this exciting new phase of their existence, they scale back a bit, the way they did with the first Iron Man film, and learn to use CGI a bit more judiciously. Not every film will need it in abundance.
Case in point; over the next two years Marvel will launch two movies featuring main characters without superhuman abilities. Black Widow and Shang-Chi, while sublimely skilled in martial arts, don't fly, wear high-tech suits of armor or even have serum-enhanced strength. In short, opportunities abound to go with purely practical effects, or to at least to use CGI in more subtle ways, like the makers of Logan did. This is the chance for Marvel to use CGI to enhance the viewer's experience, as they've done in the very best of their movies.
Also, perhaps Marvel can be a bit more deliberate with the humor. It works most of the time, but there are films in which it feels a tad overdone. I submit that Avengers: Age of Ultron was guilty of this as was, to a lesser extent, Avengers: Infinity War. Most of the time, humor works in advancing the story, but I do hope Marvel remembers that a film can survive without too much of it. Among the best examples of this, for me, are, again, The Winter Soldier and Black Panther, which, while managing to sneak some of the studio's trademark laughs into the script, manage to maintain a tone befitting the serious themes of their respective scripts. Not every Marvel movie has to be like Ant Man and its sequel or the MCU Spider-Man movies, after all, and one thing that really works for Endgame, a film that admittedly went for a fair share of laughs, is how dead serious it is about treating the effects of Thanos' snap, with extremely somber scenes like the memorial onto which Scott Lang stumbled upon returning from the Quantum Realm. Have Marvel flubbed it with the non-stop quippiness? Sure; Captain Marvel's constant snark in her debut movie just feels weird and borderline obnoxious at times, and when it's pointed out that much of Tony Stark's humor consists of him identifying characters in the films by pop-culture references (e.g. Squidward, Legolas, Reindeer Games, etc.) it's kind of hard to "unnotice" it. Adam Sandler tried doing the same thing in Pixels in what appears to be some kind of parody of it.
In truth, these ideas really feel like meaningless nitpicking considering that Marvel has gotten the art of blockbuster filmmaking virtually down to a science, and even managed to break their Oscar duck earlier this year with the multiple-award-winning Black Panther. I mean, who am I, who basically was just twiddling my thumbs and silently weeping back in the 1980s, to tell them how to do what they do? And truth be told, no matter how many risks Kevin Feige and co. take or now matter how many glass ceilings they try to break, there will always be critics.
But really, some suggestions are worth heeding. As recently as two years ago the internet was full of commentaries and Youtube videos, mostly from armchair experts, decrying the music that featured in Marvel films as "generic" or "forgettable" and propounding a number of reasons for this ranging from a general lack of quality to poor marketing strategy. Well, three years later, Marvel now has the distinction of having the first (and so far, only) superhero movie ever to have won an Academy Award for its original music score. Alan Silvestri's "Portals" from Avengers Endgame is a piece of film music that is almost as indelibly printed on the moviegoing consciousness as the Imperial March or Hedwig's Theme. I'll tell you this: ask any latter-day millennial or gen-i kid who isn't a movie buff to identify the themes of both Back to the Future and The Avengers, and I'm almost willing to bet I know which theme the majority of respondents would be able to recognize in a heartbeat. In short, Marvel paid attention, no matter how insignificant that segment of fandom seemed.
With very few exceptions in its 23-film catalog, Marvel's output has consistently entertained audiences and critics alike, but now, with a whole new generation of obscure heroes like Shang-Chi and the Eternals (as well as a whole bunch we don't yet know about) set to be unveiled, the temptation to lean on their formula will no doubt be overwhelming. I just hope, whether or not they respond to any fan input, that Marvel remembers that one of the main reasons they were able to succeed in the first place was by their willingness to try things that no one had ever seen before, and that, in all likelihood, this very same sense of daring will keep them at the forefront.
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