Peter Suderman doesn't get my Iron Man-related disgruntlement:
I have to admit, I’m a little bit baffled by the ire Ross displays toward superhero movies. If he were a purebred cultural elitist, I’d get it, but not from a guy who’s admitted to going through a Star Trek phase and who championed the last James Bond movie, which, in addition to being one of the most delicious pop pleasures of the past decade, is more or less a superhero film without the spandex. How he can maintain the posture of being both an advocate of smart genre and be disdainful toward superhero films as a class is beyond me.
He goes on to make all sorts of sensible points in defense of Iron Man specifically and the superhero film more generally. Let me clarify, then: My problem is not with the existence of superhero movies, but with their proliferation, which the success - both artistic and commercial - of Iron Man is likely to further dramatically. I love genre films as much as the next cultural populist, but it's possible to have too much of a given genre even when the movies in question are good. And having Iron Man and The Dark Knight and The Incredible Hulk (did we really need another one so soon?) as summer tentpoles, with quasi-superhero movies like Hancock and Hellboy 2 thrown in, feels to me like the equivalent of having three James Bond movies coming out at more or less the same time. Or, more aptly - since superhero films are more dissimilar from one another than than Bond movies are - it's like having a Narnia movie and a Lord of the Rings movie and, say, an Ursula K. Le Guin adaptation all being released in the same movie season, with countless more adaptations of lesser fantasy works in the pipeline for the next few years. Which is to say, it feels like too much of a good thing even if all the movies turn out to be good (which they won't), and I'd like to see some of the talent involved turn their attention to other genres for a while.
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I still don't really understand your disgruntlement. Yes, it would be tiresome to have a summer dominated by a single genre, but I'd far prefer a year in which three really excellent movies came out that were all superhero-based to one in which we had a fantasy movie, a sci-fi movie, a comic-book movie, and a romantic comedy and they all blew hard.
What's troubling about the comic-book movie's rise isn't that a comic-book-movie-filled summer will make for an irritating lack of variety among a bunch of similar, but actually really good, movies; it's that, as is Hollywood's wont, the industry will start trying to capitalize (well, continue to capitalize) on the surprisingly dominant franchises and produce derivative, poorly conceived sequels. (Spider-Man 3 and FF: RotSS are the harbingers of this trend.)
As to the question of talent, this was another area on which your essay seemed weak. What's wrong, exactly, with gifted young actors giving popularly and critically successful performances in comic-book films? It would be a shame if they became typecast and found themselves unable to get parts in a variety of other movies, but that's true of actors in any genre, and the superhero species doesn't seem more or less likely to pigeonhole an actor than, say, romantic comedy (hello, Hugh Grant).
Finally, the industry didn't need Iron Man to somehow cement the marketability of comic-book movies. That ball got rolling, at least this time around, with Spider-Man, and Iron Man is more of a member of rather than a catalyst for the general succession of these kind of movies. I understand your point about Iron Man's being a second-tier kind of franchise, and thus its success's being evidence for more than just a widespread desire to see a popular hero (Batman, Spider-Man, Hulk) on the big screen. But then how do you explain the arc of the Spider-Man trilogy? You had a very popular first installment, which was probably due to the excitement surrounding the idea of a Spider-Man movie in addition to the fact that it was actually a good film. But then the second one was even more acclaimed. By then, obviously, the novelty of the Spider-Man movie had worn off. Alfred Molina was good in it, but its success can't be explained by his role as the only real new element. And then the third one was a turd, even though it should still have had that Spider-Man draw. I think you have to take from this that superhero movies still rely on their own merits to make or break their box-office performance, and therefore that Iron Man's less-than-exalted status in the comic-book realm when compared to Cat Woman or whatever doesn't really help you make your case about its being, if I may mix a metaphor or two, the spark that will open the floodgates of superhero movies.
Posted by fumphis | May 6, 2008 1:54 PM