Have you seen the "Avengers" yet?
If your answer to that question is "yes" then not only are you like most of America but you are also like most of the world's population. If, however, you answered "no" then you are either deceased or perhaps you should be because you have no friends to go see the "Avengers" with. The superhero studded, money guzzling, glee monger is making light of most box office records as it crushed last summers "Harry Potter and the Thank God this Franchise is Done" like a roach beneath it's proverbial boot.
And that, my friends, is no small feat.
It has no reason not to do well either. Just look at the cast it's hoisting around: Robert Downey Jr. Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson (you have permission to look at her for a bit longer), Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stellan Skarsgarrd just to name.......all of them. The starpower that was united to support this film hasn't been equaled since "Ocean's 13," but most analysts didn't see it coming because they aren't your typical household names. These are new A-Listers that audiences have been wanting to see but haven't had an appealing opportunity to do so. In Avengers there were simply too many good looking people doing cool and exciting things to ignore. Indeed it was a fantastic film, even for someone like me who doesn't care too terribly much for superhero flicks.
But it scares the shit out of me.
(But why Shea? Why the fear? What could have possibly caused you to retreat into the darkest corner of your basement with a blanket and your Paul Tomas Anderson Filmography?)
Exploitation.
For quite some time I had been hoping that we might be seeing the slow decline of superhero movies as the narratives began to run together into one long, overwrought, origin story. Films like "Spiderman 3" "Green Lantern" "Superman" and "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer" had begun to boost my hope that people were beginning to tire of seeing these stories played out on screen. Box office numbers were not nearly as strong as they had been and the quality of the films had fallen from mediocre to Uwe Boll.
This had been my concern since the maiden voyage of the highly entertaining "Iron Man," that studios would begin to furiously churn out these movies without much deliberation in order to turn a quick penny. And so they did for quite some time. Yes, there were notables within the bunch, to be sure, but the quality most certainly slacked off, not to mention that most of these films were telling stories that didn't NEED to be told in the first place. This is in strict violation of Woody Allen's cardinal criteria for making a film----though I feel like he's broken his own rule a few times.
Then along came "Avengers". It was well made, well acted, light, enjoyable and any other number of pleasant adjectives that one might apply to a breezy spring day. Not only was it good but it made a "shit-load" of money. I couldn't have been more wrong to think that superhero franchises might be winding down. Studio executives are now soiling their trousers just thinking of all the money they are going to make exploiting the success of the "Avengers". Since prior film sales were underperforming they will now look to the "Avengers" as a template by which all other superhero films should be made. The problem is that they will most certainly get it all wrong.
We are going to see a rebirth of these films, and no matter how many times they fail, most studios don't learn from their mistakes. We will continue to see some hits and many misses. We will continue to watch as a franchise collapses only to be rebooted and rehashed. We will continue to see the creation of the same superhero again and again and again until more superhero's are created by the comic books so that more movies can be made to show another superhero being created to have another franchise.
I know that a superhero movie can be good. The trouble is that, in my opinion, it is much more difficult for a superhero movie to succeed critically than commercially. And what makes that even sadder is there are literally dozens of original scripts being written and passed over every day that would make infinitely better films. And that is why I so dread the results that the "Avengers" yielded. Because in the end it's success means that more good stories will go on being overlooked in favor of comic books that will be profitable.
And that to me, is very sad indeed.
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