The Superheroes Are Dying

Forget the MCU – Hancock is still my favorite superhero movie. With the broader genre imploding under the weight of an endless parade of self-referential churn, Hancock feels particularly pertinent. After all, the superheroes are dying, and that makes me question what comes next.

Superheroes have been a cultural force for over a hundred years, enjoying a slow but assured rise in popularity, first through comics and then through movies. Over the past decade and a half (powered by the MCU), they became the escapist fantasy du jour, supplanting the YA dystopias of The Hunger Games and its ilk and the epic fantasy renaissance of The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. 

I can only guess at why it took off at that point in time, but 2008 delivered both the Global Financial Crisis (which gave us the first inkling of today’s poly-crisis era) and Iron Man. With its portrayal of a man-child billionaire only just waking up to the social devastation that his toys of mass destruction had caused, the film only resonates more 15 years on. Iron Man depicted more than just a reckoning for Tony Stark, though; it was a consciously postmodern work, deconstructing what it means to be a superhero without relying on the grimdark ambiguity of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. 

The superheroes of the MCU are anything but the gilded bastions of protection they may appear as on the surface. Most of them are deeply flawed, whether that be due to naïveté, insecurity, anachronism, or arrogance. Chaos invariably ensues from their actions, and (to its credit) the MCU has explored the ramifications of that in the form of the Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War and the effects of the creation of the Department of Damage Control in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Even beyond that, though, they break things and end lives. Those flaws, that rapacious capacity for callous destruction, make them an apt allegory for the indiscriminate use of power in the real world — power that has been used to harm, to sow discord, to tell unchallenged lies, to support genocide.

If heroes are our role models, then the superhero era has told us that it’s okay to ignore the impacts of our decisions.

But that era seems very quickly to be coming to a close. Yes, James Gunn and James Safran are spinning up a new supernormal with their soft reboot of the DC Universe, but I doubt they can reinvigorate the genre in light of the diminishing returns of the MCU. To be fair, the misfires are overstated by detractors; movies in the franchise still bring in close to $1 billion from the box office fairly reliably, but Disney has noticed the needle moving of late. 

That, in concert with the now-ended WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and other factors, has seen the company shift release dates and even reassure fans that it’s slowing down the obscene production rate on these products to reestablish a quality baseline. At the same time, it’s launching the Marvel Spotlight brand to convince us that intertextuality is the problem, even as Echo, its debut series under that banner, is a Hawkeye spin-off with strong connections to Daredevil, to the point that Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin narrates the debut trailer. It’s a catastrophic mess. No wonder people are turning off and tuning out. 

I’m not here to celebrate or gloat over any perceived failure within the MCU or the superhero genre. That would be more than a little on the nose. Besides, the superheroes aren’t dead yet (even if they’ve been dead to me personally since about 2015), but the fall of one heroic archetype invariably gives rise to another. Superheroes supplanted the small-r romanticism of the End of History, which replaced the action heroes of the 1980s, reflecting a cycle that extends backward through history, through cowboys, adventurers, imperialists, knights, monarchs, and angels.

That’s something Hancock recognized. Will Smith’s Hancock and Charlize Theron’s Mary were modern-day superheroes, but they had existed for thousands of years before the term was coined in 1899. Then, they were known as gods or angels — different names for the same thing. 

For me, that helps to raise the question of what steps into the void if the superheroes fall from their pedestals.

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that critics are already grappling with. Richard Morrison took a bleak view in a column in The Times of a world of AI-generated products heralded by the upcoming Wonka — as if that’s anything but the latest in a long line of exploitative IP expansions that encompasses everything from The Fast and the Furious to Cruella. Meanwhile, Owen Gleiberman at Variety argued that a rise in video game movies after the blockbuster successes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy’s this year “would make the Age of Marvel look like the Italian Renaissance.” That’s an elitist claim if ever I’ve seen one, but it’s easy to be cynical about the future of cinema and portrayals of heroism.

After all, we live in a postmodern, post-truth era where everything is to be deconstructed, and ill-formed opinions are considered to have as much merit as evidence-backed research. I’ve written before about how it’s an age of hopelessness. Maybe that’s why nostalgia has become such a powerful draw. We look back in the hope that we can find a way forward. It certainly worked during the Renaissance, pushing Western thought out of the Dark Ages and into the Enlightenment and everything that followed. 

And looking at the cultural landscape as 2023 comes to a close makes me wonder if that’s where we are. Earlier this year, a meme about how often men think about the Roman Empire did the rounds on social media, suggesting the distant past is on the minds of many. Quite apart from that, antiquity has never really been out of vogue. Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, Braveheart and Gladiator are all historical epics, their titles seared into the public consciousness. They portray great men throughout history, and that is a space that cinema is revisiting, with variations on the theme. 

Oppenheimer, earlier this year, deconstructed the greatness of its eponymous character. Napoleon is reported to cast its own title character in a less-than-glowing light. The Last Duel problematized history with its Rashomon-like structure. The Northman portrayed history in all its violent barbarism. Killers of the Flower Moon denies a rose-hued view of American history. There’s no guarantee that Shogun, Gladiator 2, Horizon: An American Saga, or Netflix’s take on Hannibal will similarly recast our perceptions of history, but it’s nevertheless intriguing to see this glut. 

If that was all, it would be enough, but we’re also seeing classical ideas resurface in modern contexts with an almost neo-imperial theme: Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Is that coincidence? Branding convergence? Or recognition of the emergence of a kind of neo-feudalism in the political landscape that’s infiltrating the cultural one? Will these generals, these kings, these adventurers, these heroes be the role models that superheroes never were, or are we too far past the pale to dare to hold our leaders to moral standards ever again?

It’s a question that I don’t have the answer to (yet, at least), but what we know is that history builds on history. Unfortunately, we don’t just get to put the MCU back on the shelf and pretend it never existed. Its connected universe ethos has permeated culture, taking the idea of intertextual, transmedia stories to an unprecedented level and making them almost the norm. But as for whether its argument that heroes have to be destructive, powerful beings sticks… Well, I certainly hope not.