Are viewers getting tired of superhero movies? The disappointing results of the latest Marvel and DC Comics productions at the box office show that the phenomenon of “superhero fatigue” is becoming increasingly important among moviegoers.
• Also read: “The Marvels” has the worst theatrical release in the MCU
“Superhero fatigue”? This expression, which is increasingly used in specialized Hollywood magazines – but also on social networks – refers to the audience’s weariness with superhero films and series. It happens every time a new production in the genre achieves disappointing results at the box office, as was the case with the film Marvel last weekend.
Marvel’s hit theaters last Friday and collected just $47 million at the North American box office in its first weekend in theaters. This is the worst opening recorded for a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since the franchise’s inception in 2008.
The complicated start of Marvel’s new production confirms an important trend that has been worrying Hollywood for several months. DC Comics failed last summer with Flash, a film that reportedly cost more than $300 million to produce but grossed just $260 million at the global box office.
The third part of Marvel’s Ant-Man saga also had disappointing results at the box office last summer.
“Audience fatigue with superhero films is very real,” director Nia DaCosta admitted to trade site Total Films a few weeks before the release of her film “The Marvels.”
However, the filmmaker seemed pretty confident that he could turn things around by offering a “different” and “crazier” feature film than previous Marvel productions. Her film’s poor start at the box office suggests that she failed in her bet…
“Boring” films
In recent years, several major filmmakers such as Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese and James Cameron have not hesitated to denounce the lack of originality and script weakness of the latest superhero films.
“They’re damn boring,” Ridley Scott even told the trade website Deadline Hollywood in November 2021.
“I think I’ve done three big scripted superhero movies. One would be Alien with Sigourney Weaver. The other one would be Gladiator and the other one would be Blade Runner with Harrison Ford. Those are superhero movies. So why superhero movies? [d’aujourd’hui] Don’t you have any better stories?
Scorsese went a step further and recently said he wanted to “fight against superhero movies” to save cinema.
“The danger is what it does to our culture. “There are entire generations who will think that this is what cinema is,” the veteran filmmaker lamented in an interview with GQ magazine last month.