I don't understand why people aren't sick of superhero movies already.
Judas f'kin Priest, it's been years and years of this stuff. Same music (ok, debatable... but always BIG), same stories, same drama, same FX, same 'I'm a common man, but still a superhero', same bullshit.
Yeah yeah, I know there is Marvel vs DC, but really it's the same stories with different heroes.
This stuff still sells? Good grief, humanity must be desperate.
Well, here's a big theory-dump...
IMO "superheroes" are just the wrapper for spectacle movies. Wondering when people are gonna be tired of superheroes is like people in the 50s wondering when moviegoers will finally be sick of Biblical epics. Plenty of the audience for those films were not going just because of the content but because that was the most spectacular thing you could see on screen ("Cast of Thousands" etc). Just like they liked cowboy movies in the 60s and disaster movies in the 70s.
When movies can animate any element you want photorealistically into real life, or vice versa, then you essentially have erased the lines between film and animation. After the first-gen experiments with this in the 90s and early 00s,
Avatar and
Transformers really blew it open. As soon as we reached a world where the studio doesn't have to carefully husband the CGI's time on screen because of budget reasons or because of scenarios where it would pop out as fake, then superheroes had a big competitive advantage over monster movies like
Kong Skull Island (or
Transformers if you see it as a sort of monster movie). Instead of a movie where you spend 1/3rd of the time with the CGI and 2/3rds of the time with a cast of human characters talking into their walkie-talkies about what the CGI will do next, you can just have a story with a protagonist who turns into CGI whenever the story needs.
That's why the two Marvel movies people like the least are: Thor 2 with the very Godzilla-esque tag-along cast of normal and boring human characters; and Iron Man 3 where he has to solve problems without his suit (although I liked that movie).
And on the flip-side this is also why Marvel was able to launch their cinematic universe with the supposed "D-list" character of Iron Man, and why they weren't really taking
as much of a risk as people thought at the time with movies like
Guardians and
Dr. Strange and
Ant-Man. As long as you put original and exciting spectacle in the movie, you're keeping the main element that is actually attracting audiences. Same reason why DC had a huge success with a movie starring supposedly the
least liked character in their main lineup with
Aquaman.
Anyway I legitimately think Zack Snyder doesn't understand this. I don't think he gets that superheroes are just a convenient vehicle to have an animated bash-up spectacle-em-up on screen. I believe he thinks these movies mean the dorks have inherited the earth and comic books are cool now. And yeah, that's true to the extent that people like JJ Abrams, Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon get to make big movies. But it's
not true that people are going to see these movies because they love the "iconic" or "forever" version of these characters. Just poll a random group of people on the street and ask them if Iron Man is dead or alive. He's perfectly alive in the comics.... just like Batman didn't die or retire just because the
Dark Knight Rises version of him did so... but in this case, very unlike Batman, the appeal is the specific incarnation of the character. What's interesting is that despite the "cosmic" stakes of the godlike characters of DC, right now Marvel has higher stakes! people actually cared more if Captain America or Iron Man would die in
Endgame than they cared if Batman dies in any movie, ever. Maybe Marvel will eventually ruin this with reincarnations of their characters, but I doubt they will.
And this is why DC isn't getting as many people as Marvel. Leaving aside
Aquaman, the DC version of a spectacle movie actually isn't as spectacular as a Marvel film. It's people getting thrown back-first horizontally through concrete for forty minutes. Just look at the big statue fight in
Justice League where Superman fights the other heroes. It's a snoozefest, literally half the moves in the fight are people getting punched [quick cut] reaction shot of them flying 40 feet and making a little concrete crater when they land. Just the fight between Iron Man & Hulk in
Age Of Ultron (which was a
mediocre Marvel movie!) has more creativity and real spectacle than all of DC. A lot of which comes from the carefully planned transition of the action sequence through a bunch of different settings and locations which create "mini stories" inside the action sequence like Iron Man trying to save the elevator full of people. DC
mostly lacks this.