10 Signs You Have Superhero-Movie Fatigue

Nostalgia for the Days When Every Superhero Movie Wasn’t a World-Straddling Event
Scale counts for a lot in show business. Bombard audiences with too many self-proclaimed blockbusters in a row, they’ll get pitted out and start searching for some humbler-minded fare to cleanse their palate. The fact every new superhero vehicle insists on being the biggest, loudest, and most profitable to date provokes thoughts of what it all amounts to. Rolling Stone contributor Sam Adams recently wrote a piece expressing his exhaustion at the overblown fate-of-the-world stakes now commonplace in superhero cinema, and this same principle applies to the promotion thereof. To paraphrase a supervillain: When every movie is a can’t-miss one-of-a-kind event, nothing is.
Your Retinas Have Been Seared by So Much Whiteness
Marvel and DC have recently taken baby steps to add diversity to their stable of colorfully-clad crimefighters, with a Black Panther project finally in the works and Wonder Woman close at hand. But in terms of pure numbers, however, the world of superheroism is about as male and white as a Three Stooges fan convention set in a blizzard. (Thank you, Don Cheadle’s War Machine, for breaking up the sheer tope-ness of it all.) The ceaseless cries for wider representation have been heard at long last, but enlisting Gal Gadot and director Ryan Coogler has advanced the field a single pace in a long journey. The themes of empowerment and independence endemic to superhero stories would resonate more strongly with marginalized groups than anyone else — and if you’re getting impatient with the notion that studios have plenty of catching up to do when it comes to recognizing that, it’s time to seek mass entertainment elsewhere.
You Long for a Little More Genre Variation
Though it had plenty of detractors, this past February’s Deadpool hit audiences like a bucket of cold water due to how flagrantly different it was in comparison to the usual men-in-capes homogeneity. The coarser language, graphic sexuality and irreverently self-aware humor zagged where the bland malaise of overproduced CGI and lukewarm one-liners repeatedly zigged. At the most basic structural level, the glut of these superhero films are interchangeable, placing forgettable villains in stock plotlines against generic heroes. Introducing untested spins on genre has enlivened some of Marvel and DC’s TV properties – Marvel has found success by steeping Daredevil and Jessica Jones in film noir, and DC’s collaborations with the CW have spun gold from teen soap opera hay. So change up your pace, studios, or risk losing your audience.
Superhero Movies Rival Sports and the Weather as Played-out Conversation Topics
In theory, on a long enough timeline, everything worth saying about superhero movies will have been said. When our culture of anticipation demands new material from amateur and pro pundits every week, the dialogue has nowhere to go but full collapse. (And don’t even get us started on the pre-release social-media blitz once embargoes are lifted.) By the time a given superhero project actually becomes available to the public, we’ve been bombarded with so many previews that the film itself tends to confirm the audience’s pre-conceived notions — check in, yep, just as suspected, moving on.
Craving Something Resembling a Unique Visual Style
Regardless of whether Marvel or DC happens to be your cup of tea, their films are united in their total lack of an identifiable visual aesthetic. The latter’s anointed golden boy Zack Snyder cloaked Man of Steel and Batman v Superman in a thick blanket of murky night, a visual sensibility incoherent beyond its aggressive grimness. Marvel hasn’t done much better, with none of its properties setting themselves apart via any inventive formal trickery. The vast majority of superhero movies have operated under a rudimentary point-and-shoot technique that refrains from challenging itself or the audience. Any common knock against these films as “factory-made” stems not from their origins in a large, efficient corporation, but the automatonlike rigidity with which they’re assembled. There’s room for creativity. You’d like to literally see something new.
You’ve Lost the Ability to Differentiate Between Movies and TV
Franchising has sustained the superhero-movie boom like lifeblood, ensuring that every billion-dollar success can smoothly and efficiently spawn several more in its mold. So the analogy comparing new films to pilot episodes ,with all the attendant pressures of serialization has been made and re-made dozens of times over, feels incredibly apt; a film’s primary raison d’etre is now clearing a path for its inevitable sequel. You know that businesslike streamlining of entertainment into high-volume content to be digested and moved on from as quickly as possible? You finally realize that it sucks the heart, soul, and fun right out of the film. And you know it’s time to change the metaphorical channel.