This super box-office won't last, writes DONALD CLARKE
IF WE KNOW one thing about the movie industry, it’s that that punters love superheroes. At some point in late April, the first radioactively enhanced humanoid will emerge from his phone booth and formally declare the super season open. Over the succeeding four months, various mutated humans prowl the streets until leaves fall and the cinemas begin clearing space for middle-brow, Oscar-friendly entertainments.
This summer we are to encounter more hyper-beings than ever. X-Men Babies have already sorted out the Cold War. Thor has thundered his way across the skies of Arizona. We will also make contact with Green Lantern and Captain America. Summer really is the wrong time to attempt a takeover of the world from your massive underwater base.
Ah, it was ever thus.
Except it wasn't. Glance back at the history of the summer blockbuster and it becomes clear that the mainstream superhero movie is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even as fresh talents as Alan Moore and Frank Miller were invigorating Reagan-era comics with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmenand a new, gloomier Swamp Thing, superheroes were rarely seen in the multiplexes.
Only Superman and Batman, two stalwarts of DC’s mid-century heyday, ever broke into the upper reaches of the box-office charts. An industry that had happily embraced broad space opera, cheesy musical comedy, knuckle- brained slapstick and films about talking mules still regarded the suited vigilantes as unworthy of its high-minded intentions.
There was, it must be said, an easily stated aesthetic problem. A man in a skin-tight suit can, when drawn by Jack Kirby or Gene Colan, be made to seem ineffably graceful and cool. When actors donned the gear, however, they too often (witness a clever gag in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man) looked like bad pro-wrestlers cast adrift from the ring.
The advent of computer graphics combined with the offbeat sensibilities of imaginative directors such as Raimi and Christopher Nolan managed to make some sense of the Lycra, rubber and modified Kevlar.
Over the space of 10 years, the superhero has been dragged back from exile and established as a core weapon in Hollywood’s assault on the universe.
Yet, it's hard to deny that the form is beginning to look a little decrepit. X-Men: First Classand Thordelivered only modestly impressive performances at the box-office. Hackneyed attempts to "subvert" the genre such as Kick-Assand The Green Hornetsuggest that even firm adherents are having heretical doubts. Among the many efforts to reboot franchises, only Nolan's Batman films have discovered worthwhile new energies.
It took about 50 years for the western to exhaust the interest of cinemagoers. Unless something astonishing happens soon, the mainstream superhero film will accomplish that unhappy feat in a little over a decade. Get it together, superpeople.
