Superhero Movies: Too Many Too Soon

Look, I love superheroes. I do Black Superhero Month every year in February. I read comic books on the regular. I love superhero movies, that can't even be denied. In spite of all that, I think we need a break from superhero movies. I'm not saying there should never be another, I'm just saying, let's take a break. Not a break forever but a temporary break and see if it's really love or lust for the new kid on the block.

Right now as I write this there are 32 named superhero movies with release dates all the way up to the year 2020. That's just between Marvel and DC heroes. That's not to count whatever may come from other comic companies. It's ridiculous and the market is just over saturated with superhero movies right now. It's also kind of ridiculous that Cyborg, Black Panther, Carol Danvers and Wonder Woman are the only non white middle aged men getting solo films, but that's another issue. I get it, there's money in superhero films but eventually you're just going to milk the genre until there's no money left because everyone is just worn down.

We're also getting to the point where lame heroes are getting their own films. I'm not talking about Aquaman. I've addressed this, Aquaman is awesome. I'm talking about characters like Ant-Man, Carol Danvers and Gambit. Really Gambit, I love Gambit, he's one of my favorite X-Men. This is just going to end up bad like the Wolverine solo films. We're also getting films based on The Sinister Six and The Suicide Squad. Apparently they've run out of heroes and now we're doing villains. But, here's the problem, who are they going to fight? Suicide Squad will probably run some black ops government mission, but how are they going to fit The Joker into that? They're just cramming stuff in. Will The Sinister Six take on Spider-man, because that's almost all they're known for.

I could see if every superhero movie was a good one, but that's not the case. We're not going to pretend that Deadpool didn't spend 90 percent of a movie with his mouth stitched close? Are we going to pretend the X-Men movies didn't get so bad they had to rewrite their own continuity? What about that Green Lantern movie? Man of Steel causes debates to this day, but what about Superman Returns, or are we going to wipe that out of continuity too? Yes. How about Daredevil? It's 50-50 with these movies. They're either really good or excruciatingly painful.

It's not even like these stories haven't been told before. With the exception of maybe The Dark Knight trilogy, these are all just repeats of old stories. At some point we're going to run out of major stories for the films to gut. How far away are we from Superman Red/Blue where Superman splits into a red and blue version of himself with electric powers? What about The Rainbow Batman or How Many Ways Can Robin Die?

Now, I'm not just going to complain. I've got some solutions. How about we just use some different heroes? How about a Black Lightning or Sentry movie? What about a Cloak and Dagger movie? Do you see what I'm getting at? We're running out of stories with middle aged white males as the lead. Since we're going to do 7 Spider-Man movies in a decade can we get Miles Morales or Migue O'Hara because as much as I like Peter Parker, I can't sit through another 2 Spider-Man movies about him before 2020. How about we create some new heroes and create stories about them from scratch. Hancock worked out pretty well. Lastly, we can just make action movies because that's what we all want anyway.

You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet
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