Mediocre superhero movies were the norm for a couple of decades before Marvel hit it big, and it appears mediocre superhero movies are the norm again, if the reactions to DC’s Supergirl are any indication.
The question is why DC president James Gunn, for one, is letting it happen when there’s so much at stake financially and culturally—so much more than back in, say, 1997, when Shaquille O’Neal (a Flat Earther, incidentally) as DC Comics’ Steel made only $1.7 million at the box office but no one really cared, not most fans, not DC, not Warner Bros., not its recently-merged parent company Paramount, and not DC’s since effectively symbiotically-linked rival Marvel/Disney, which was bankrupt back when Shaq’s movie was a mere financial hiccup for DC.
Was James Gunn mesmerized by the chance to collaborate with beautiful writer/actress Ana Nogueira on not just Supergirl but, if all went according to plan, reboots of Wonder Woman and Teen Titans to boot? This is the man, after all, who after years of collaboration with trashy Troma Studios got suspended by Marvel/Disney for joking online about underage sex, who married that fetishy muscle chick from his show Peacemaker, and who seems to have gone out of his way to shoehorn a split-second scene into The Suicide Squad that allowed his purportedly group-sex-loving fellow director Taika Waititi to play the papi to a cute Latina actress. Have hormones addled his judgment?
Or might Gunn have been pleased that by adapting the darkest, most cynical Supergirl comic book, written by self-proclaimed former CIA agent Tom King, he could suck up to the agency that many have suspected for decades really pulls the strings in media?
Luckily, for all the political interference in our culture, customer dollars still talk, and Supergirl’s box office failure (only two films into Gunn’s presidency at DC, if you ignore the half-dozen or so movie projects he inherited when he first took over, which also bombed in rapid succession) probably gives the Paramount execs all the excuse they need to make big changes at the newly-acquired DC. And I didn’t think last year’s Superman was all that great either but can see why some loved it.
In the fast-changing world of Hollywood, I don’t buy for a second the claims that Gunn’s position is safe and that Warner and Paramount are committed to his long-term vision of which ostensibly-connected shows and films to do next. I don’t think we should even assume that DC, Warner, and Paramount will have the same company names a couple of years from now, and I suggest they consider using “Paramax” or maybe “Warmount” as their new umbrella name.
Nothing is forever in Hollywood, and nothing is forever in the DC Universe, not even how it comes to an end in the far future. In print, they’ve often depicted the cloaked, mysterious figure called the Time Trapper lurking at the very end of time, but they’ve repeatedly changed the explanation of who’s under the hood. At one time, it was an evil Superboy. For a while, logically enough given the constant story revisions, it was a living, sapient timeline that could alter itself and reality at will.
Now, per writer/editor Mark Waid’s admirable recent attempt to cobble a mostly-coherent single timeline out of 90 years of print stories, Time Trapper supposedly is and always was the living Kryptonian weapon named Doomsday. If DC and Marvel enjoy trolling each other, and DC’s trying to be dark in the Supergirl movie, maybe they should’ve tacked a glimpse of the desolate far future onto the end and called the movie Supergirl: Doomsday.
They know Marvel’s about to release Avengers: Doomsday, which also in some sense (probably) deals with the end of time, but fans might enjoy the overt competition. Here’s hoping, in any case, that they enjoy that movie, and the imminent Spider-Man: Brand New Day, more than they’ve enjoyed Supergirl. As Marvel president Kevin Feige seems aware, the general public tends mentally to lump all these superhero movies together like a single giant brand without regard to company or fictional timeline, so if the public starts thinking superhero = crap, Marvel may be just as doomed as DC and vice versa, regardless of who cranked out which film.
Many aging, dispirited superhero and sci-fi fans probably find themselves in much the same position I have: reluctantly drifting in the direction of ostensibly more-mature TV and film that has at least a dash of sci-fi or fantasy or just plain surreal weirdness in it, perhaps thereby to rekindle a little bit of the wonder from my naïve, franchise-trusting youth.
So it is that I find myself watching things like mystical Fargo (by Noah Hawley, who not coincidentally created the trippy Marvel-based mutant show Legion and the great recent Ridley- and Ripley-worthy Alien: Earth series).
And, separately but for similar reasons, I find myself in a love-hate relationship with (pretty) writer/director/actress Brit Marling, creator of the annoying, relentlessly left-liberal, New Agey yet undeniably sci-fi-ishly-enticing shows The OA (which may stand for “original angel,” a flattering reference to the cult-leader-like character Marling herself plays) and more recently the Iceland-set, eco-catastrophe-themed, Emma Corrin-starring A Murder at the End of the World, the former still a bit obscure and the latter a hit (perhaps because A Murder at the End of the World bears a slight resemblance to the more overtly crowd-pleasing but still edgy and androgynous Nordic hacker mystery The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).
If you’ve encountered some rich, glamorous but ostensibly very-earnest and reflective elite-lefty-school alums in your life, you won’t be shocked to hear Marling offers us, in The OA, a vision of psychiatric patients navigating the multiverse through the use of techniques such as interpretive dance while fending off the manipulations of an overbearing psychiatrist played by Jason Isaacs, who I’d bet was cast because of his resemblance to the late John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who for good or ill convinced many of his patients they were the survivors of UFO abductions.
Isaacs also, probably not coincidentally, bears a resemblance to the tech guru, conclave-leader, and possible murderer played by Clive Owen in A Murder at the End of the World. I don’t want to leap to the conclusion that Marling is still sorting out her feelings about an affair with a professor who looked like that from back when she was a (no doubt high-achieving) undergrad, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Whether art’s created by corporate bureaucracies or navel-gazing loners, it often drags us into the creators’ psychological turmoil more than it does the characters’ psyches.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey