Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay “We've all been in the trenches of love, we've all gone through the highs and lows, so Scott [Neustadter] and I felt that the only way to tell this story [(500) Days of Summer] was to come at it from a completely real place” – Michael H. Weber This time two years ago, I began to explore why romantic comedy films can be so hard to nail. Specifically, I picked apart the best (and worst) parts of some classic, old-school “rom coms” from Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in an effort to better understand what makes this genre of moviemaking both timeless and susceptible to its time. But, I’m not sure I fully satisfied my curiosity with just one blog. Thus, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d revisit this investigation which will hopefully produce a more complete grasp on what makes the romantic comedy such a ripe foundation for filmmakers through the ages to dive into.
So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for several movies. You have been warned.] When Harry Met Sally… (1989) Over the course of several meetings with filmmaker Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail), director Rob Reiner (Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, Misery) pitched her ideas for a new film project but she was uninterested. Around this time in his life, Reiner found himself struggling with dating again after being divorced from fellow director Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own) for some time. While commiserating with frequent collaborator and fellow bachelor Andrew Scheinman, Reiner admitted to his desire to make a movie about two friends who agree to keep their relationship platonic to avoid complicating things. After pitching the idea to Ephron (who liked it), she started work on several drafts of the screenplay. To write the film, Ephron interviewed both Reiner and Scheinman (who collectively became the basis for the lead male character) while drawing on her and her friends’ own lives and experience to craft the leading woman. In addition, she interviewed people from Castle Rock Entertainment (which became the inspiration for interlude scenes of young couples being interviewed about how they met). To structure the film using dialogue, Ephron drew on Reiner’s real-life friendship with Billy Crystal (City Slickers, Analyze This, Monsters, Inc.)—notably the split-screen scene of Harry and Sally talking on the phone while watching TV together. When initially drafting the film’s conclusion, both Ephron and Reiner agreed to have the eponymous lead characters remain friends because they felt it was more realistic. However, they ultimately realized that having them get together in the end was more appropriate for the story. A mix of big-name actors and rising stars at the time, such as Tom Hanks (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan) and Richard Dreyfuss (American Graffiti, Jaws, Mr. Holland’s Opus), were offered the role of Harry but they declined it. Meanwhile, Billy Crystal “vicariously” experienced the director’s return to single life and thus was unconsciously doing character research for the part. Ultimately, he was chosen to play the lead while Meg Ryan (Top Gun, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail) was hired in the female lead of Sally. Released on July 14, 1989, When Harry Met Sally… ended up grossing over 92 million dollars at the North American box office on a sixteen-million-dollar budget. It was also near-universally praised by critics, who singled out Ephron’s screenplay, Reiner’s direction, and Crystal and Ryan’s performances (with Ephron being nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but losing to Dead Poets Society). In years since, the film was ranked in the Top 25 of the American Film Institute’s list of the top comedy films in American history. Most recently, in 2022, the movie was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance. In the minds of many film critics and historians, the movie remains foundational to the romantic-comedy genre of cinema. During my viewing of When Harry Met Sally…, I couldn’t believe how good the movie was. I knew it had been an important aspect of popular culture around the time it came out & retained a presence among cinephiles ever since. My expectation going into watching the movie, however, was that it could in no way be as good as people said it was. Fortunately, it wasn’t; it was even BETTER. 😊 Like any great rom-com, this film either soars or flops on the strength of the chemistry shared between its two leads. Without question, the believably slow-burn nature of the relationship between Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) works beyond just the concept. In their different types of interactions over the twelve years that the film takes place, both Crystal and Ryan display an exceptional command of the dialogue & material which ensures the audience feels the genuine evolution of their love for one another. Undoubtedly, Harry and Sally remain the “quintessential couple” of this “quintessential romantic comedy” due, in large part, to how well they pull off this dynamic. Of course, like any good movie, the actors in When Harry Met Sally… can’t deliver great performances if the writing isn’t great. Fortunately, Nora Ephron’s screenplay more than deserved the Oscar that it won. As the screenwriter, Ephron has an uncanny ability to balance grounded comedic moments with emotional drama & romance that never feels cheesy or forced. Rather, she demonstrates a mastery of paralleling character arcs that culminate in this iconic fictional relationship while avoiding the countless pitfalls of tackling such a story. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest of Ephron’s rom-coms that she directed (namely, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail). Thus, her screenplay for this movie remains (in my humble opinion) her magnum opus. As a whole package, When Harry Met Sally… remains the standard by which many rom-coms to this day are measured. Not only is it one of my favorite Rob Reiner films, but it’s easily one of the best romantic comedies ever made. That being said, I look forward to the day when I see a film & say: “That’s a better rom-com than When Harry Met Sally…” because it’ll mean that another movie comes close to its greatness. The Wedding Banquet (1993) In 1986, Taiwanese screenwriter and activist Neil Peng revealed to director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi) that one of their mutual friends had moved to America and had entered a same-sex relationship without his parents’ knowledge. Two years later, Lee and Peng started writing a screenplay based on this occurrence and were joined by Detroit native James Schamus (The Ice Storm, Lust, Caution) early on in the process. While the first draft was written in Chinese before being translated into English, the screenplay was re-written several times in both Chinese and English. For the lead role, Lee had to persuade Winston Chao (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Meg)—who was working as a flight attendant when they met—to accept the part. Chao was reluctant, but ultimately agreed when Lee ensured that he would hire an acting coach of Chao’s choosing to work with him. While shooting on location in New York City, Chao spent three or four hours each day before filming to rehearse and prepare. Due to the film’s low budget, Lee relied on shooting in free or public locations (notably JFK International Airport) or even the private homes of cast and crew members. However, the titular banquet scene was shot in the ballroom of a Sheraton Hotel close to LaGuardia Airport. Made on a shoestring budget of one million dollars, The Wedding Banquet was released in Taiwan in March of 1993 before getting a North American release in August that same year. Earning a global box office gross of 23.6 million dollars, the film became the most financially profitable movie of the year. It also received mostly positive reviews from critics, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (losing to Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba’s Bella Époque). Later analyses have highlighted the cultural and artistic significance of Lee’s creative decision to use a combination of English and Mandarin subtitles to “reach a peaceful coexistence between apparently irreconcilable cultures.”[i] While I don’t love all of Ang Lee’s movies, The Wedding Banquet is certainly one of his good ones. It certainly isn’t as action-packed as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as groundbreaking as Brokeback Mountain, or as epic as Life of Pi, but it’s mature & nuanced exploration of intersections of identity, family, resistance to tradition, & cultural assimilation allow the film to transcend the sometimes-confining trappings of traditional rom-coms. In a very real sense, it feels like Lee sought to progress beyond basic love stories narratively while also make a statement about the importance of moving past restrictive sociocultural expectations in real life. Simply put, The Wedding Banquet is a pretty forward-thinking film considering that it came out over three decades ago. The most obvious reason for this is how the film shines a spotlight on same-sex love. Given when it was made, the movie could’ve easily made its central romance between two men into a gimmick whose primary purpose was to make the audience laugh at their relationship. Fortunately, Lee’s sensitive approach to his characters (already evident in his directorial debut Pushing Hands and would continue to be integral in his filmmaking) is on full display here. The main character, Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), has an overall healthy & loving relationship with his partner Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) in Manhattan. From there, much of the comedy & “bits” stem from the culture clash that results from the lengths he goes to conceal his true identity from his traditional Taiwanese parents (Lung Sihung and Gua Ah-leh). Consequently, the audience laughs at the situations that Gao gets himself into as a flawed human being rather than the simple fact that he’s gay. I get that someone born in the 21st century reading this might be thinking: “Isn’t that how it should be anyways?” Well, as a fellow millennial, I agree with you. However, as a cinephile, I can appreciate how progressive Lee’s approach to this kind of story truly is while also acknowledge that it was only an early step towards queer cinema becoming mainstream in Hollywood with films like Gus van Sant’s Milk, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, and the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once. If anything, I lament the fact that The Wedding Banquet is not spoken often in equal regard with Ang Lee’s other great movies (like the ones aforementioned). In my humble opinion, it unquestionably deserves that amount of praise. Not only for being a barrier-breaking film that helped Western audiences acclimate to viewing identity & self-acceptance through a (somewhat) foreign cultural lens, but also for being just a very good movie with plenty of laughs & feels from start to finish. Given that it’s lesser known than When Harry Met Sally… or some other classic rom-coms, I strongly encourage you to seek this out if you haven’t seen it. (500) Days of Summer (2009) In 2002, screenwriter and New Jersey native Scott Neustadter (The Fault in Our Stars, The Disaster Artist) was a student at the London School of Economics where he fell “crazily, madly, hopelessly in love” with a girl coming off of a bad breakup. However, after the relationship ended “painfully and unforgettably awful,” Neustadter was inspired to co-write a screenplay based on his experience with frequent collaborator Michael H. Weber. Due to Weber being in a long-term relationship at the time of writing, he felt that the “tension” fostered between his opposite perspective from Neustadter fostered some of the key comedy in the film. In agreeing to direct the film, Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man, Gifted) wanted to make an “unsentimental” and “uncynical” movie that was less of a romantic comedy and more of a “coming-of-age” story. Specifically, Webb aimed to portray the emotional experience of heartbreak as critical to the human experience as “war or poverty.” Along a similar line, the film’s star Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, Looper, Snowden) greatly related to the protagonist because of how “extreme” his own past experience with heartbreak felt at the time. In particular, Gordon-Levitt appreciated the film’s “honest” examination of the “often profoundly funny” nature of romance. After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, (500) Days of Summer was released in the United States in August of 2009 and grossed over 60 million dollars worldwide on a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar budget (thus becoming a “sleeper hit” that summer). The film received very positive reviews from critics, with several of them referring to it as one of the best movies of the year (it appeared on several publications’ top-ten lists for 2009). In assessing the film’s cultural impact ten years after its release, Gordon-Levitt’s co-star Zooey Deschanel (All the Real Girls, Elf) addressed the common misconception of Summer being a villain. In agreement with her, Gordon-Levitt warned viewers against sympathizing with his character’s “mildly delusional obsession” with Deschanel’s character since he was falling in love with “the idea of a person” as opposed to a real human being. While I’m a sucker for a classic rom-com ending where the two people in love end up together happily ever after, I also really appreciate the (sadly) less-common choice to have the film’s central relationship not work out. Maybe feeling this way is sacrosanct, but such a subversion of the genre’s trope can be quite refreshing when done right in films like Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (which surely deserves its own blog someday 😊). One of these kinds of rom-coms that I found myself really liking is Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer. In many respects, this movie is more dramatic than comedic (although the ennui of the main character can be rather funny in a cringy kind of way). Its writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, set out to offer up a no-holds-barred critique of a common trope in many romantic comedies centered on the straight male’s experience of love: a destructive fixation on trying to create a fantastical version of his “dream girl” to fall for rather than actually loving a person for who they are. While the source of some iconic rom-coms of the past, this trope (which remains undeniably true to many young men’s struggles with young love) can do so much damage to how inexperienced adolescents and young adults conceptualize romance. I understand that some people watch (500) Days of Summer and come away thinking that the movie has, in fact, endorsed that lens through which to view love. Respectfully, I disagree. And I think the two lead actors’ portrayal of the central relationship favors my interpretation of the screenwriters’ and director’s artistic intentions. Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the aforementioned fantasy-driven young male, goes on a painfully relatable (albeit cringe-inducing) journey of self-discovery as he realizes over the course of a year-plus of his life that Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), the girl he pines for, is not who he’s in love with. Rather, it’s his delusional conception of who (or, rather, what) Summer represents that he’s pursuing which takes him most of the story to come to terms with. While this role could’ve felt consistently more repelling than sympathetic, Gordon-Levitt brings enough relatability to just how pathetic he is to make him likeable enough for the story to work. Deschanel’s character, on the other hand, could’ve easily been written (and thus portrayed) as a stereotypically unlikeable woman who unempathetically rejects the advances of the “nice guy” without remorse or reservation. Instead, Deschanel brings a much-needed level of humanity to Summer by playing well off of Gordon-Levitt’s attempts at making their relationship permanent with a believable degree of making him see reality without being needlessly cruel. With its empathetic central performances & exceptionally relatable screenplay, (500) Days of Summer is (in my humble opinion) a solid example of a great modern romantic comedy. Namely, because of how it fully embraces its bittersweet ending. By allowing the audience to feel Tom’s pain for losing Summer while also conveying that such a flawed relationship was not good for him (or Summer, for that matter), we are allowed to appreciate him moving on and meeting someone new who he can get to know for who they genuinely are & continue to grow as a person. Without shoving its morality into the audience’s faces, the movie expertly leaves us believing that we can be & do better without fully giving up on the tantalizing promise of “true love” being out there for all of us to find. Always Be My Maybe (2019) While at a fried-rice cooking competition hosted by a mutual friend, comedian Ali Wong and actor Randall Park (The Interview, Ant-Man and the Wasp) met and became close friends who supported each other’s projects ever since. Since meeting, Wong and Park spent those years intermittently developing “our version of When Harry Met Sally…” Once Wong made this idea public in 2016, the idea picked up steam and was picked up by Netflix in August of 2017 with Wong and Park attached as co-writers alongside Michael Golamco (Please Stand By). The rap persona of Park’s character was based on his amateur music career as part of the Bay Area hip-hop group III Again from the 1990s. In naming his character’s band Hello Peril, Park took inspiration from the term “yellow peril”—the derogatory term alleging a cultural threat that East Asians pose to Western society. Park co-wrote several rap songs for the movie with hip-hop producer and San Francisco native Dan the Automator. In conceiving of Wong’s character’s celebrity love interest, Wong and Park always had Keanu Reeves (Speed, The Matrix, John Wick) in mind but were unsure if he would be both available and willing. Reeves, a fan of Wong’s stand-up comedy, enthusiastically agreed to shoot his scenes. To do so, he worked around his schedule for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum in order to fly to San Francisco. He spent two days shooting in the summer of 2018 before flying back to New York. He even contributed ideas to the screenplay (such as him wearing glasses with no lenses during the dinner scene). As a tribute to Reeves’ contributions to the movie, Park wrote the film’s end credits song “I Punched Keanu Reeves.” After sending an e-mail to get his permission to use his name in the song, Reeves gave some suggestions for the lyrics. Following a limited release on May 29, 2019, Always Be My Maybe was released onto Netflix two days later and was watched by 32 million households within four weeks. The film was widely praised by critics, who lauded Park and Wong’s chemistry and the film’s portrayal of Asian love. It has become an increasingly common part of film discourse these days (particularly on social media) to parrot Quentin Tarantino’s[ii] belief that direct-to-streaming films lack the same cultural resonance as theatrical releases. In my humble opinion, this is an unfalsifiable hypothesis for the time being. Mainly because streaming companies like Netflix and Apple TV+ have only just started becoming viable competitors to the major movie studios in the last few years (the increasing presence of streaming films in the Oscars race is testament to this). That being said, I do think that streaming originals (the really good ones, at least) will cement their due place among peoples’ top movies lists over the next few decades. When it comes to the best modern romantic comedies, I hope one of them is Always Be My Maybe. As the directorial debut of relative newcomer and Iranian-American filmmaker Nahnatchka Khan (Totally Killer), this movie—like most rom-coms—succeeds almost wholly on the chemistry of its leads. Fortunately, the seemingly close-knit friendship between Ali Wong and Randall Park did them wonders in portraying high school flames that have grown apart in adulthood. Both the aimless wannabe rapper Marcus (Park) and successful yet emotionally distant celebrity chef Sasha (Wong) come off as very relatable people who have similar struggles despite being rather different people on the surface. They live complicated lives and end up needing the other’s presence to help them figure things out. A familiar rom-com narrative device? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less effective here. In fact, this is one of the better examples of it that I’ve seen. On top of their solid performances in front of the camera, their collaboration on the screenplay (along with Michael Golamco) serves up a healthy mix of drama, romance, and comedy that fully delivers on all you want from this kind of movie while having a little more to say than many other films within the genre. With the interweaving of Marcus and Sasha’s journeys of self-improvement & self-discovery, they ensure to make the characters’ mutual coming together and recognizing their love for each other feel organic and deserved. Furthermore, thanks to Wong and Park’s expert comedic timing as actors, almost all of the jokes & bits land incredibly well (most notably the multi-scene satire of a fictionalized Keanu Reeves as Sasha’s celebrity boyfriend). In a sense, Always Be My Maybe combines the multi-decade love story of Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally… with the mature exploration of Asian-American family & identity from Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. Yet its injection of modern comedic sensibilities & pacing as the “secret ingredient” makes this movie a criminally underrated romantic comedy that (in my humble opinion) deserves much more attention & praise than it’s received in the five years since its release. If nothing else, though, we’ll get even more great movies like this one in the future. 😊 Which of these modern rom-com classics (or soon-to-be classics) is your favorite (or least favorite)? What other more recent entries in this love-filled genre do you think people should check out? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst [i] https://archive.ph/20131116072525/http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/360/806 [ii] https://deadline.com/2023/05/quentin-tarantino-retirement-james-bond-tv-cannes-1235379761/
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“Universal [Studios] created one of the first (if not the first) franchises in Hollywood history with its monster movies, and absolutely created the first cinematic universe when they started having those monsters meet each other and hang out with Abbott and Costello. It was a different time.” – Tom Reimann Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Without a doubt, franchises have dominated Hollywood filmmaking for a long time. From a decades-in-the-making Top Gun sequel to new iterations on classic characters like The Batman to another shameless cash grab like Jurassic World: Dominion, people nowadays are simply more likely to spend money going to the movies if they recognize its brand. Considering how ubiquitous franchises are now with the moviegoing experience, I asked myself some time ago: what was the first film franchise?
To kick off my horror-themed October blogs, I wanted to celebrate the legacy of Universal Pictures’ “Classic Monsters” by delving into the histories (and sharing my thoughts) on some of the iconic movie monsters from this inaugural cinematic universe. So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for several movies. You have been warned.] Dracula (1931) In the wake of F.W. Murnau being sued by the widow of Bram Stoker for the release of his silent horror film Nosferatu, enthusiastic Hollywood producer and co-founder of Universal Studios Carl Laemmle, Jr. (All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) legally purchased the film rights to Stoker’s gothic fiction for $40,000. Upon recognizing its potential at the American box office, he conceptualized his adaption of the vampiric story to be a large-scale spectacle akin to Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louis Bromfield was hired to pen the first draft of the screenplay. However, many aspects of his attempt to reconcile Stoker’s novel with the stage-play version were rejected by Universal due to budget constraints or deemed as potentially controversial. As a result, Bromfield was replaced with playwright and screenwriter Garrett Fort (Frankenstein, The Mask of Zorro). Successfully channeling inspirations from both the hit Broadway adaptation and Murnau’s Nosferatu (notably the scene of Renfield’s pricked finger evoking the Count’s bloodlust), Fort’s final draft became the shooting script and earned him the writing credit for the film. Silent horror film star Lon Chaney (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera) was intended to star in the lead role. However, his sudden death due to a throat hemorrhage forced Laemmle, Jr. to consider other actors. After several were up for the role, the studio hired Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnny Belinda) before he was recast with Robert Ames (The Trespasser, Holiday) who was quickly recast with David Manners (The Miracle Woman, The Mummy). As Manners ultimately agreed to the role of John Harker, Laemmle, Jr. remained reluctant to consider Hungarian native Bela Lugosi (White Zombie, The Raven, Bride of the Monster) who received positive reviews for his portrayal of Dracula on the stage. Coincidentally, Lugosi was in Los Angeles for a tour version of the play while the film was being cast. Despite the studio resisting, Lugosi lobbied for the role and ultimately won them over after accepting a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars for a nearly two-month shooting schedule. Principal photography took place over the course of 36 days in Los Angeles, starting in late September of 1930. Due to director Tod Browning’s lackadaisical shooting style, cinematographer Karl Freund took over much of the shoot and thus became an uncredited director for the project. Manners recalls Lugosi being “polite” but “distant” from the rest of the cast as he struck him as not so much acting as being just his true, eccentric self. Several performers in the film, from Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing) and Helen Chandler (Mina Seward), derided the film and/or their role in it. Lugosi himself refused offers to play Dracula on stage going forward due to his fear of being typecast. Ultimately coming in under budget at just over $340,000, Dracula subverted Universal Studios’ expectations by being a box office success upon its release in February of 1931. Raking in a profit of $700,000, the film became Universal’s best-selling film of that year. Newspaper reports indicated that audience members fainted in shock at the horror on screen, seemingly confirming the studio’s worry that American theatergoers were not prepared for a strait-laced “chiller” flick that included no humor to undermine the movie’s supernatural elements. It was later revealed that these reports were orchestrated by the studio to increase audience interest in the film. Contemporarily, critics received Dracula positively (particularly highlighting Browning’s direction, the creepy atmosphere, and Chandler’s performance). Decades later, the film was re-evaluated for its cinematography and Lugosi’s iconic turn as the most famous vampire character ever to hit the silver screen. Film historians credited the movie with popularizing the cinematic vampire; some even contend that the horror genre in film was born with Dracula. The film’s critical and commercial success launched Universal Studios’ representation as the progenitor of early horror cinema, from James Whale’s Frankenstein (released that same year) to George Waggner’s The Wolf Man. Pretty similar to my thoughts about films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula is an important movie more than it is a good one. Did it set the standard for the monster flick? Sure, but it’s been surpassed by nearly every big-name film in its subgenre that’s been released since (including the three other movies that I’m talking about today). I say that for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it looks old. The sets for Dracula, whether they be matte paintings or drapes with illusory 3-D depth, appear very cheap even for the standards of 1930s moviemaking. Furthermore, its special effects (notably the use of a bat on a string) fail to effectively immerse the audience in its story or evoke any kind of terror. The movie also feels old. I particularly found the cinematography to be dull in comparison to other horror flicks of the time (the fact that Murnau’s Nosferatu, a German silent film made ten years prior, looks more haunting than this movie is simply inexcusable). The editing does the film no favors either; the director’s overuse of awkward close-ups on the actors’ uninteresting faces clearly indicate that he failed to differentiate between what looks good on camera to a movie theater versus what looks good on stage to a Broadway audience. And given the fact that silent movies generally made pretty good use of its score to indicate emotion and progress the story, Dracula’s utter lack of musical sound in any way, shape or form to accentuate its “scarier” moments just shows a lack of grasp on how horror should be done. However, what was most clear on a recent rewatch was that filmmakers from the time were still not entirely sure how to direct actors in the sound era. While the cheese feigning as horror is most apparent in Helen Chandler’s performance as the damsel victim of Count Dracula’s mind control, virtually all of the performances (yes, including Lugosi) feel like they’re either trying too hard to be scary in front of the camera or simply not trying at all. All in all, Dracula paled in comparison to its German predecessor and simply does not hold up through 21st-century eyes. While this doesn’t detract from its historical significance as a seminal progenitor of modern horror, I am very glad that we evolved from this style of filmmaking since then. Frankenstein (1931) In the wake of losing over two million dollars in revenue in 1930, Universal Studios was in need of some profitable movies. Their wish came true in the form of Tod Browning’s Dracula, which convinced producer and studio executive Carl Laemmle, Jr. to announce Universal’s intentions to make more horror films. Their first move? To purchase the film rights to the stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel “Frankenstein.” Bela Lugosi hoped to play Henry Frankenstein in the film, but Laemmle, Jr. hoped for Lugosi to play the Monster in order to keep his name on the bill for the movie. At the time, it was reported that Lugosi rejected the offer and left the project due to creative differences with Laemmle, Jr. and Robert Florey (The Cocoanuts, Daughter of Shanghai), who was hired to direct the project. However, later evidence suggests that Lugosi was forced out when James Whale (The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein) took over as director. In doing so, Whale cast British actor Boris Karloff (The Mummy, The Body Snatcher) as the Monster. As consolation for losing the role, Universal had Florey and Lugosi direct and star, respectively, in their film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Special effects artist Kenneth Strickfaden (The Wizard of Oz, Young Frankenstein) designed landmark special effects for the “creation scene” in the movie. Supposedly, Strickfaden secured the use of a Tesla coil from the eponymous inventor himself. The effects were so successful that Universal used them for every subsequent movie involving the Monster. Furthermore, many actors in the project ended up becoming regulars in Universal’s slate of horror flicks during this era: Lionel Belmore (Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein), Marilyn Harris (The Bride of Frankenstein), and Dwight Frye (The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein), to name a few. Following its initial release in November of 1931, Frankenstein (made on a budget of approximately $262,000) grossed 1.4 million dollars from theater rentals (and earned Universal a profit of twelve million dollars by 1953 following several re-releases). Critics at the time compared the movie favorably to Dracula, with many lauding it as a significant improvement over it and a landmark achievement for the horror genre. Near-universal praise went towards the make-up effects on Karloff. Nine years before Dracula, the movie was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Today, it is considered by film historians as one of the greatest movies of all time. In many ways, I tend to agree with the contemporary critics who hailed Frankenstein as a superior horror movie to Dracula. Even more so, it supersedes in virtually every aspect of filmmaking. First of all, its concept is scarier than its predecessor. Whereas Dracula plays into the idea of fictional monsters terrifying us, Frankenstein emphasizes the fact that the worst evils on this Earth are the ones that we create ourselves. Colin Clive’s foundational portrayal of the “mad scientist” Henry Frankenstein helps this mission along by offering a character whose pseudo-scientific hubris and God complex makes for a far more compelling tragic figure than David Manners’ John Harker or Helen Chandler’s Mina Seward from Dracula. Yet, the heart and soul of Frankenstein is Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster. Despite not being written as overtly sympathetic, Karloff injects subtle moments that help the audience empathize with this humanoid automaton with the mind of a toddler by portraying his aggression being the result of ignorance rather than malevolence. This, of course, makes the Monster’s demise in the fiery climax at the windmill all the more saddening. Simply put, the fact that Karloff got 1930s moviegoers to care about a nameless, synthetic creature with no dialogue is rather impressive. But what is more impressive is that his version of the character still holds up today. Another vast improvement over Dracula is how the film’s screenplay is pretty decently paced. While the first act establishes Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris in the form of creating his monster, the rest of the film fleshes out the increasingly severe consequences of that decision as the monster wastes no time exploring the world around him (often to the detriment of others). Ultimately, the build to the third act is propelled by the subtler and more heartwarming moments (i.e. the Monster bonding with a little girl over tossing flowers into a pond) only enhances the story’s tragic nature in which both Dr. Frankenstein and his creation suffer at the hands of a paranoid angry mob who have no patience for mercy or forgiveness. So, is Frankenstein a great movie? I don’t think so, but I hold it in higher regard than many of its contemporaries (including Dracula) for taking a more sensitive and heartfelt approach to the monster genre. Without it, we would have never gotten Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. 😊 The Invisible Man (1933) In the wake of the critical and commercial success of Dracula, director Robert Florey suggested to Universal Studios that they should adapt H.G. Wells’ novel “The Invisible Man” as part of their plan to make more horror movies. Despite studio executive Carl Laemmle, Jr. initially opting to make Frankenstein that year, the studio purchased the film rights to the book in September of 1931 for ten thousand dollars (Wells demanded final script approval as a condition for selling the rights). Having bought the rights to Philip Wylie’s novel “The Murderer Invisible” already, Universal planned to inject some of that book’s more gruesome elements into their film adaptation of Wells’ story. Due to the critical and commercial success of Frankenstein, both director James Whale and star Boris Karloff were expected to return for Universal’s adaptation of “The Invisible Man.” However, Whale left the project by January of 1932 to avoid being profiled exclusively as a horror director. Thus, the studio hired Robert Florey to direct after the release of his film Murders in the Rue Morgue with Bela Lugosi. By April of that year, Florey completed a first draft of the screenplay that he co-wrote with Garrett Fort (who wrote Dracula and co-wrote Frankenstein). Meanwhile, after his next film The Impatient Maiden flopped, Whale returned to directing horror flicks around the same time that Florey left Universal to work with producer Samuel Bischoff. Meanwhile, screenwriter John L. Balderston (The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein) submitted his screenplay adaptation of “The Invisible Man” to the newly-hired director Cyril Gardener (Grumpy, Doomed Battalion) which was also primarily based on Wylie’s novel. Despite more treatments being written, the studio had no final screenplay by July of 1932 and thus loaned Karloff to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to shoot Charles Brabin’s adventure flick The Mask of Fu Manchu. Upon the release of another horror film for Universal, 1932’s The Old Dark House, Whale signed on once again to direct the adaptation. Still, no final script was written. After eight weeks writing a screenplay involving a revenge plot against the Bolsheviks, Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty, Unfaithfully Yours) turned in his draft to the studio only to be fired the next day. Due to the troubles with the script, Whale wrote his own treatment which Wells rejected (convincing Whale to leave the project for a second time). By January of 1933, Universal reported over one million dollars lost in film productions for the year prior and decided to shut down production for six to eight weeks. In the meantime, German filmmaker E.A. Dupont (Piccadilly, Atlantic) and American journalist John Weld became the studio’s new director-writer team. However, by February of 1933 Whale agreed to sign back on as director (despite being laid off by Universal for twelve weeks during the production shutdown). The film’s new screenwriter, R.C. Sherriff (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Dam Busters), ignored the studio’s request to incorporate material from Wylie’s novel or the previous drafts. As Sherriff neared completion on his screenplay while living in London, Karloff was said to be leaving the project in the newspapers by May. After Wells approved his screenplay (notably his decision to make the protagonist a lunatic), Sherriff returned to Hollywood in July where Universal Studios accepted his script. Whale considered a few English stage actors for the lead role, but ultimately wanted Claude Rains (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia) who was seriously considering retiring from acting to live on a farm stateside. Despite being initially hesitant about hiring an unknown actor, Universal eventually approved of Rains’s casting after Whale showed them a screen test of the actor reading a scene from the script (and gave him top billing). Without knowing the full extent of the role, Rains was sent by Whale to Universal Studios labs to have molds and casts of his head made for the special effects team. Principal photography lasted from June to August of 1933 with another two months of post-production which primarily focused on special-effects work. According to leading lady Gloria Stuart (The Old Dark House, Titanic), the visual effects shots were filmed “in utmost secrecy” on set; Universal kept the secret by falsely claiming in press for the movie that the invisibility effects were done with optical illusions and mirrors. Whale worked with John P. Fulton (The Ten Commandments, Vertigo) on the special effects for the movie. Over a year after the film was released, Fulton broke down how duplicate negatives, black velvet tights, wires, and wire frames contributed to the effects work, stressing that his major obstacle was matching lighting and fixing small imperfections within the frame with a brush and opaque dye. With a final budget of approximately $328,000, The Invisible Man was released in October of 1933 and was a big success (despite its final box-office gross being unknown to this day). Contemporary critics were generally positive, specifically with regards to Whale’s direction, Sherriff’s screenplay, and Rains’s performance. Later on, cinephiles and historians highlighted the film’s strengths as its humor and groundbreaking special effects, with some describing the movie as a black comedy. In 2008, the movie was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. The legacy of The Invisible Man differs from other tentpoles horror flicks of the time like Dracula and Frankenstein. For one, its sequels were not directly tied to the original. Also, there were no immediate remakes from other studios (á la the Christopher Lee Dracula films of the 1950s and 1960s). However, director Leigh Whannell (Upgrade) revitalized interest in the character with the release of his 2020 remake starring Elisabeth Moss. While I fully acknowledge that The Invisible Man isn’t technically a monster movie, I simply could not do this blog without talking about it. In my humble opinion, it is undoubtedly the best of Universal’s classic monster movie line-up despite not having a classic monster in it. For me, though, that’s probably its best quality. Much of this, of course, is thanks to the exceptional lead performance of Claude Rains as Dr. Jack Griffin (otherwise known as the titular “Invisible Man”). Watching the film for a second time, it became even more clear that Rains unquestionably comprehended what he was tasked with and embraces the mission of his character. Griffin, an ambitious chemist who discovers the secret to invisibility, is a man whose reality-altering discovery that empowers him is also what has exponentially stripped him of his sanity. That, in and of itself, is a compelling arc for the villainous protagonist. However, mix in Griffin’s psychopathic and sadistic antics and The Invisible Man transcends its character-study formula to become one heck of a fun watch. While Rains’s performance is a huge part of the movie’s fun factor, much of the nihilistic wit of the eponymous character comes from R.C. Sheriff’s screenplay. Without being too zany all the time, his writing of the increasingly paranoid townsfolk helps the Claude Rains-free scenes move the plot along in entertaining fashion. But it’s Griffin’s sardonic, maniacal dialogue that truly elevates the film’s writing far and above all of its contemporaries (and even some horror movies today). The fact that a scary movie from 1933 manages to make me laugh with it and at it simultaneously is, in my humble opinion, a genuine achievement. Coming off of Frankenstein, I found James Whale’s directing style to be more refined in The Invisible Man. His approach to editing, particularly in the third act, helps propel the story towards its violent yet pointed climax with a combination of wipes and cuts spiced up with beats from the score (thank God this studio finally added music to these horror movies!). However, the technical prowess most on display in The Invisible Man is the “invisibility” effects. Having seen the movie twice, I still don’t understand how Whale’s special-effects team managed to pull this off nearly ninety years ago. In the same way that King Kong revolutionized stop-motion and All Quiet on the Western Front brought realistic warfare to the silver screen, The Invisible Man showed that sci-fi B-movies could be innovative moviemaking for the better. Simply put, the fact that those effects still hold up and look better than some modern CGI says a lot about what is and is not needed in order for a movie to become magical. If you haven’t seen The Invisible Man and are skeptical based on other monster movies from the era, I implore you to give it a shot. It’s fun, funny, and entertaining because of its age rather than in spite of it. A movie that old that’s still enjoyable to watch? Worth a shot! 😊 Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) While filming Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1941, actor and producer William Alland (It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula) was attending a dinner party where he met Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (The Pearl, The Night of the Iguana) who shared with him a myth about a race of humanoid, underwater creatures that inhabit the Amazon River. This influenced his story notes for a film idea, which he entitled “The Sea Monster,” a decade later (although the French fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” also served as inspiration). By 1953, Alland’s notes were expanded into a full treatment entitled “The Black Lagoon” by Harry Essex (The Fat Man, It Came from Outer Space) and Arthur A. Ross (Kazan, Brubaker) around the same time that Andre DeToth’s horror film House of Wax was released to major box-office success. Universal Studios was inspired to film the project in 3-D, and hired acclaimed sci-fi director Jack Arnold (It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man) to helm the production. Milicent Patrick, a trailblazing female animator at Walt Disney Studios, designed the head of “The Creature” costume for the film (although make-up artist Bud Westmore significantly downplayed her creative contributions for roughly fifty years). Jack Kevan (The Wizard of Oz), whose primary work involved constructing prosthetics for World War II veterans with amputated limbs, created the monster’s body suit. Two performers portrayed “The Creature”: Ben Chapman, a Korean War veteran and Purple Heart recipient, played him on land in Los Angeles while Ricou Browning (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) filmed his underwater scenes with a second unit in Wakulla Springs, Florida. On the Universal back lot, Chapman worked an average of fourteen hours per day and was unable to sit in the costume. Due to easily becoming overheated, Chapman frequently remained in the artificial lake of the studio’s back-lot requesting to be hosed down and his vision was usually obscured resulting in unintentionally injuring his co-star, Julie Adams, while carrying her. On the opposite coastline, Browning would hold his breath for anywhere from two to four minutes at a time. One day while shooting underwater, a snapping turtle purportedly bit off a chunk of the costume’s foot and Browning chased the turtle to get it back. Released in March of 1954, Creature from the Black Lagoon earned over one million dollars at the box office and was generally well-received by critics for its underwater cinematography and atmosphere. Retrospectively, the movie’s eponymous monster has had a significant impact on popular culture from television and music to games. Most recently, “The Amphibian Man” from Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water was directly influenced by “The Creature.” Following the classic monster flicks of the 1930s and early 1940s, Universal focused on crossover films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula for much of the World War II era. While these films can be credited for making Universal’s monster movies a cinematic universe, they aren’t nearly as iconic as Dracula, Frankenstein, and others. But one movie from the post-“Golden Age” era that I think deserves more praise is Creature from the Black Lagoon. While pretty removed from its classic predecessors, this movie is an ideal representative for the best sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s like The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. At approximately 80 minutes long, it moves at a steady pace and never feels like wasted time. Furthermore, its simple yet fun concept makes for a good, old-fashioned “creature feature” that (in my humble opinion) surpasses the likes of Dracula and even Frankenstein. Much of its fun factor has to do with the film never leaning too heavily into the romantic subtext involving “Gil-Man.” While it’s certainly there, you can just ignore it and appreciate it as a monster-hunting tale. However, the thing that helps Creature from the Black Lagoon stand out among its contemporaries is its cinematography. For a black-and-white film made in the early 1950s, its underwater photography is crisp, clear, and clean-looking in a way that some movies that utilize shooting beneath the ocean’s surface nowadays simply cannot mimic. In addition to the ahead-of-its-time aesthetic, the film’s emphasis on shooting underwater helps flesh out the day-to-day existence of the world of “Gil-Man” so as to aid the audience immerse ourselves in his story. While by no means the best monster movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon is a solidly entertaining movie that surprisingly holds up despite some of its acting and characterization being clearly dated. If you want a movie with (slightly) more modern sensibilities than the likes of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, this is probably a good choice for a slow Sunday evening. Which of these classic monster movies is your favorite (or least favorite)? What other old-school monster flicks do you think people should check out? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst “I used to think that my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it’s a fucking comedy.” – Arthur Fleck/Joker (played by Joaquin Phoenix) “I cherish peace with all my heart. I don't care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it.” – Christopher Smith/Peacemaker (played by John Cena) Today, my summer blog series on the evolution of comic book movies comes to an end. I’ve examined the origins of the genre with Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman and looked at how this genre’s come to dominate cinema before and after the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not to mention the impact of the MCU itself). Thus, what better way to end this series than by looking ahead to try and predict where this genre is going for the next ten years…and beyond? And what better way to do that than look back on four comic book movies that (in my humble opinion) foreshadow trends within the genre in unique yet equally interesting ways? Before we get started, I have decided to not write about James Mangold’s Logan here because I wrote about it so extensively in another blog. So, click here for my full thoughts on Logan both as a western and as a groundbreaking comic book movie. So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for several movies. You have been warned.] Black Panther (2018) By the early 1990s, Wesley Snipes (Blade, Dolemite Is My Name) began working to get a film about the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther made out of his desire to offer an artistic counter to how he felt Hollywood typically portrayed Africa in cinema. By 1994, Snipes entered talks with Columbia Pictures to star in the project and was in talks with writer-directors like John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) about the movie. However, by the early 2000s, issues with the drafted screenplays and at Marvel’s corporate level stalled the project in the midst of Snipes starring in the Blade trilogy for the company. In 2005, producer and at-the-time Marvel CEO Avi Arad (X-Men, Spider-Man 2) restated the company’s intentions to adapt Black Panther to the silver screen under the newly-formed Marvel Studios. This intention was reiterated two years later by Marvel Studios producer Kevin Feige, but Snipes’s involvement was on hold due to him serving a three-year sentence for tax evasion. In 2011, documentarian Mark Bailey (Ethel, Last Days in Vietnam) was hired by Feige to write a screenplay for the project. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe in full swing by this point, seeds were being planted related to the world of Black Panther and Wakanda (i.e. the introduction of vibranium in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger). In October of 2014, Feige officially announced the feature film Black Panther set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Chadwick Boseman (42, Get on Up, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) cast in the lead role of T’Challa that would first appear in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Several directors, including Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) and F. Gary Gray (Friday, Straight Outta Compton), were in talks with Feige about directing the movie. Discussions with another emerging filmmaker, Ryan Cooler (Fruitvale Station), had stalled but picked up once again after the successful opening of his 2015 sports drama Creed. In January of 2016, Coogler was officially hired to direct Black Panther. Part of Coogler agreeing to join the project was Feige allowing him to bring on some of the crew from Fruitvale Station and Creed in order to differentiate the look and feel of Black Panther from other Marvel Studios movies. Specifically, he hired cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Dope, Mudbound), production designer Hannah Beachler (Moonlight, No Sudden Move), and composer Ludwig Göransson (Creed II, The Mandalorian, Tenet) for the film. In addition to directing, Coogler also co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story). Coogler and Cole were heavily inspired by Jack Kirby’s Christopher Priest’s, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ comic runs on the character, among others. Specifically, Coogler wanted to feature Kraven the Hunter as a main antagonist for the film but could not due to Sony holding the film rights to the character. While Coogler ensured with Cole that the story of the film remain independent from anything else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Feige ensured fans that the story and the location of Wakanda would be cemented as “a very important” link to Avengers: Infinity War and its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. Furthermore, Coogler wanted to integrate the Wakanda language (first introduced in Civil War), which was heavily inspired by the Xhosa language of southern Africa, into the screenplay as much as possible. He particularly wanted characters to utilize it organically, but often. By July of 2016, much of the supporting cast for the film was officially announced. This included Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, The Jungle Book, Us) as T’Challa’s lover Nakia, Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Just Mercy) as the main villain Erik Killmonger, and Danai Gurira (The Walking Dead) as Wakandan general Okoye. Later announcements that year were Winston Duke (Us) as renegade chieftain M’Baku, Forest Whitaker (Good Morning, Vietnam, Bird, The Last King of Scotland) as King T’Chaka’s trusted advisor Zuri, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) as T’Challa’s best friend W’Kabi, Angela Bassett (Boyz n the Hood, Malcolm X, Soul) as T’Challa’s mother Ramonda, and Letitia Wright (Ready Player One, Death on the Nile) as T’Challa’s little sister Shuri. In designing the look of Wakanda, Coogler was inspired by the African nation of Lesotho due to its geography enabling it to mostly resist European colonization. In doing so, he aimed to ground the environments of the film in reality and overhaul some of the more alien-looking looks of Wakandan technologies found in Kirby’s comic book aesthetic. Furthermore, Beachler looked to the pre-colonization architecture of the Mali Empire in West Africa as well as the aesthetic of other nations (i.e. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia) in order for the sets of the film to serve as a love letter to the African continent. Regarding the clothing for the characters in the movie, costume designer Ruth E. Carter (Malcolm X, Amistad, Dolemite Is My Name) looked to the wardrobe of several African tribes (i.e. Maasai, Basotho, Zhosa, Zulu) to inspire the film’s costumes. Specifically, she aimed to avoid objectifying the women of the Dora Milaje by fully armoring them in red which reflected many African cultures while also being practical outfits for battle. The hair department, supervised by Camille Friend, sought to encourage the actors to keep their natural hair by utilizing braids and twists while only using extensions or wigs when necessary. Principal photography lasted from January to April of 2017. Mostly shooting both in the studio and on location in Atlanta, Georgia, with the crew moving to various parts of Busan, South Korea for the car chase scene in the first act as well as Uganda, South Africa, and Zambia for aerial footage and capturing scenic environments. During post-production, several visual effects studios (primarily Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM) were involved in enhancing the urban environments of Wakanda with the mission of sticking to Coogler’s vision for including and preserving authentic aspects of African culture. Released in February of 2018, Black Panther became the second-highest-grossing film of 2018 by earning more than 1.3 billion dollars on a 200-million-dollar budget (it is currently the thirteenth-highest-grossing film of all time). Critically, the film was almost universally praised for its direction, screenplay, costume and production design, music, and the performances of Boseman, Jordan, and Wright. It earned the first Best Picture nomination for a comic book flick, and Marvel Studios’s first Oscar wins for costume design, score, and production design. Culturally, critics and film historians recognized the significance of the film as an achievement in non-stereotypical representation for the African and African-American communities due to its majority-black cast and making Africa and African culture the focus of a major Hollywood blockbuster. Having written about Black Panther twice, once on its own terms and another time within the broader context of the MCU, I’d rather focus here on the film’s cultural significance within the comic book genre. So, if you’re interested on my criticisms of the movie in and of itself, I recommend clicking either of those links. Despite my mixed feelings about it, I cannot deny how important Black Panther is for the superhero genre. Without question, it aimed to elevate blockbuster filmmaking in the modern age with some relevant and potent social commentary about the history of abuses towards black and brown people. I imagine that’s part of the reason why the film (particularly Jordan’s character of Erik Killmonger) resonated so much with so many people. That being said, the movie does a decent enough job injecting its political messages without forgetting what makes these kinds of movies entertaining. By having some solid action scenes (I always enjoyed the casino fight and car chase in Busan, South Korea), Black Panther retains the fun-spirited nature of comic book movies for much of its runtime. While I don’t believe that it always does so well, I acknowledge that there’s enough action-adventure beats to make the film a fun ride most of the time. Arguably, however, the film’s legacy will not lie with its story, characters, or themes, but with its cultural resonance and impact on Hollywood as a whole. Peoples’ thoughts about the credibility and relevance of the Academy Awards may vary, but (in my humble opinion) Black Panther cemented its name in modern cinematic history by becoming the first superhero flick nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Simply put, the fact that this kind of a movie can be viewed in the eyes of industry figures and critics as a great movie worthy of awards-season recognition shows just how much this genre of cinema has become mainstream with both cinephiles and general moviegoers alike (it also proves that The Dark Knight was robbed, but I digress 😊). Needless to say, this movie has hopefully paved the way for future comic book movies that are just as, if not more, deserving of such Oscar recognition to receive it. All that being said, Black Panther is undeniably an important watershed moment for positive representation of African and African-American culture in film (preceding how Shang-Chi did this for Asian representation and Ms. Marvel for Muslim representation). As a white person, I cannot personally speak to the importance of this. Yet, I will not argue against the fact that seeing black superhero role models like T’Challa, Okoye, and Shuri on the big screen gives hope to black and brown kids around the world that they can achieve their dreams and make a difference in the world. Regardless of my opinions about the film as a work of art, the cast and crew of Black Panther deserve the praise they received on this level alone. And, hopefully, its sequel coming out this November will have a similar cultural significance in addition to being a great comic book movie. Image by eduardo merino from Pixabay Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Considered a less-than-ideal way of this kind of news breaking, the public learned of Sony Pictures’ intentions to develop an animated comedy Spider-Man-focused movie with writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie) following Sony’s computers being hacked in 2014 and e-mails about the project being leaked. Producer Amy Pascal (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Venom) approached Lord and Miller about the project, who agreed on the condition that they were allowed to adapt Marvel Comics writer Dan Slott’s 2014 “Spider-Verse” storyline with Miles Morales as the protagonist. The project was officially announced in the spring of 2015, with Lord Miller attached to produce as well as write a story treatment, as a standalone story from previous and concurrent live-action Spider-Man flicks. Initially intended to be solely directed by writer and animator Bob Persichetti (Shrek 2, Puss in Boots), both Peter Ramsey (Batman Forever, Rise of the Guardians) and Rodney Rothman (22 Jump Street) signed on to co-direct the project by the end of 2017. In writing the screenplay with Rothman, Lord knew that a good reason was needed for this particular Spider-Man project (ultimately deciding that it was telling Morales’s story becoming the famous web-crawler that made this project unique). Once figuring that out, Lord and Rothman were consulted by Morales’s co-creator Brian Michael Bendis. In the original versions of the script, a romance between Morales and Spider-Gwen was included but scrapped. However, the character of Spider-Gwen was kept as a prominent supporting player thanks to the efforts of producer Christina Steinberg. Finally, in brainstorming a post-credits scene, Lord and Rothman initially aimed to feature a union of all three live-action Spider-Man actors but Sony advised against it in order to avoid confusing the audience. By April of 2017, Shameik Moore (Dope) was cast to voice Miles Morales while Live Schreiber (Scream, Goon, Spotlight) would voice Kingpin as the film’s antagonist. By June of 2018, Morales’s father Jefferson Davis and uncle Aaron Davis were cast with Brian Tyree Henry (If Beale Street Could Talk, Eternals) and Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book) playing the roles, respectively. Also, Jake Johnson (21 Jump Street, Jurassic World) was announced as the voice of Morales’s mentor, Peter B. Parker/Spider-Man, and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, The Edge of Seventeen, Bumblebee) was revealed to be voicing Spider-Gwen. In choosing which alternate Spider-Man characters would be in the movie, Lord and Miller aimed to find characters from Marvel Comics lines who “were as diverse as possible.” In overseeing the animation design, Lord and Miller wanted the audience to feel like they had “walked inside a comic book” in order to use animation to tell a Spider-Man story in a way that live action was unable to. After nearly one year of work by two animators, ten seconds of footage was signed off on by Lord and Miller which became the basis for creating the visual language of the movie. In order to hit the film’s late-2018 release date, the initial crew of one animator grew to over 170 by the summer of 2018 (the largest animation team in Sony’s production history). By having artists working on top of rendered CGI frames in 2D, the creative team for the film aimed to make every frame “look like a comic panel” with some inspiration from Japanese anime (particularly the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli). Released in December of 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse grossed over 375 million dollars on a 90-million-dollar budget and earned rave reviews from critics who praised the film’s animation style, characterization, story, voice acting, and humor. Many people, including actors from other comic book media, praised the movie and deemed it a game-changer for the medium of both animation and the superhero movie genre. It became the first Sony Animation film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and is to date only one of five non-Disney or Pixar animated films to win the award. For my more extensive thoughts on Into the Spider-Verse in and of itself, click here. Instead, I want to focus my thoughts here on what this movie did for the comic book movie genre both at the time and going forward. As I’ve said before, I don’t love Into the Spider-Verse in the way that many comic book movie fans do. However, similar to Black Panther, I greatly respect what it has done both for the genre and for moviemaking in general. I think that sometimes people forget how this movie pulled off a multiverse story months before the release of Avengers: Endgame (let alone years prior to Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). In fact, I’d contend that general audiences may not have bought into the epic time-travel story of those aforementioned Marvel movies as much as they did without the success of Into the Spider-Verse. On its own terms, however, the movie excels as an innovative piece of visual storytelling. The work that Sony put into designing its signature style and flair made an incalculable impact on how filmmakers can faithfully adapt the look of comic books and graphic novels for the silvers screen. While the frenetic nature of Into the Spider-Verse can be (in my humble opinion) overwhelming at times, it’s undeniably the most forward-thinking aspect of the film. But the part of the movie that I’ve found to be generally underappreciated is its subtle celebration of diversity. Without ever drawing attention to Miles Morales’s Puerto Rican heritage, audiences can pick up on those hints without being taken out of the story. Furthermore, the fact that two of the Spider-People (Gwen Stacy and Peni Parker) are women does not come off as a cynical example of forced inclusion, but rather serves the filmmakers’ thematic lens of telling a story about how people with different backgrounds can come together to help others not in spite of what makes them unique, but because of it. Without question, that’s the most beautiful thing about Into the Spider-Verse. And combined with its prescient multiverse story and hyper-creative animation style, it’s no wonder that the movie remains culturally relevant nearly four years after it first came out (and with two sequels on the way!). Joker (2019) During the early 2010s, Joaquin Phoenix (Gladiator, Walk the Line, Her) was looking for a low-budget “character study” project centered on a comic book villain. He was more interested in a one-off experience compared to offers from Marvel Studios to sign a multi-picture project to play Doctor Strange or another comic book hero. Around the same time, Todd Phillips (Old School, The Hangover) turned down multiple offers to direct superhero movies because he lacked interest in the genre. However, he was intrigued by creating a more grounded comic book movie, and was specifically attracted to telling the origins of DC’s Joker because the lack of a definitive backstory gave him more creative freedom than other characters. Following the premiere of his black comedy crime film War Dogs, Phillips pitched his idea for a standalone Joker origin story to Warner Brothers. Despite being known for his comedy movies, Phillips was driven to do something more “irreverent” and proposed to the studio that they differentiate themselves from Marvel Studios by producing low-budget, one-off films. They were particularly swayed by this prospect after the critical and commercial success of Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, and decided to de-emphasize the DC Extended Universe by revealing plans for a Joker film with Phillips directing and co-writing the screenplay with Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter), while Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street) agreed to produce. In writing the screenplay, Phillips and Silver struggled to have some of the subject matter be approved by Warner Brothers. Furthermore, they sought not to make the film overtly political despite its themes being relevant to modern society. Instead, Phillips had childhood trauma and mental illness in mind when writing the script. Drawing inspiration from several of Scorsese’s movies, notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Phillips looked to several character studies of the 1970s as well from Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Sidney Lumet’s Serpico. In terms of looking to comics, the premise for the movie came from the 1988 graphic novel “Batman: The Killing Joke” while the climactic talk show scene was inspired by a scene from the 1986 graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns.” Yet Phillips insisted that he aimed to not tell the story of Joker, but rather “the story of becoming Joker” and thus “picked and chose” what they liked from a variety of comic books featuring the character. Phillips looked not just to fiction for inspiration, but also living conditions in New York City in the 1980s. A specific instance that inspired the movie’s subway shooting scene was Bernhard Goetz’s shooting four men on a New York City subway in 1984. But in bringing another interpretation of Joker to the silver screen, Phillips aimed to retain the ambiguous nature of the character’s past by having him be a delusional and unreliable narrator (and thus giving the audience total freedom to interpret the film as they prefer). Despite the studio pressuring Phillips to cast Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Aviator, The Revenant) in the lead role, he insisted on casting Phoenix to play Joker. However, despite the story initially exciting Phoenix he hesitated to accept the offer due to his concern that the character could become a “simplified, reductive archetype” and thus cause the audience to feel distant from him. In the wake of the disappointing performance of 2017’s Justice League, Walter Hamada took over as head of DC Films at Warner Brothers and sifted through the movies currently in development to decide which projects should move forward. Unsure of the prospects of the Joker movie, Hamada shrunk its budget to fifty-five million dollars in an effort to dissuade Phillips. However, by July of 2018 Phoenix had made a deal to star in the movie after four months of back-and-forth negotiations with Phillips. As soon as Phoenix signed on, Hamada greenlit the film and set it for an October 2019 release date. Principal photography began in New York City in September of 2018, and moved to Jersey City and Newark by October before shifting back to the city by mid-November. Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2, The Harder They Fall), who accepted a supporting role in the movie, described how Phillips would rewrite scenes the night before and she and Phoenix would rehearse them in the make-up trailer before shooting the scene that day. Furthermore, according to Phillips, Phoenix was known to sometimes walk off-set while filming out of a need to compose himself (which confused some of the actors because they felt that they messed up). However, Phoenix apparently never walked off set while shooting with Robert de Niro (The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, The Irishman) who commented that what Phoenix was doing was “very intense.” In designing the look of Gotham for the film, Newark was specifically chosen due to the presence of poverty which Phillips wanted to be apparent in Arthur Fleck’s surroundings. To prepare for the role of Fleck, Phoenix lost 52 pounds so as to appear “malnourished,” studied videos of people diagnosed with pathological laughter, and read books about political assassins in order to grasp the motivations of killers. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival in August, Joker debuted in theaters on October 4, 2019. On a budget of approximately 62 million dollars, the film grossed over one billion dollars worldwide becoming the highest-grossing R-rated film and the third-highest-grossing DC film of all time (surpassing Deadpool 2 and The Dark Knight, respectively). While critics were generally towards the film’s direction, visuals, score, and cinematography (with universal praise going towards Phoenix’s performance), they were more divided over its portrayal of mental illness and violence. Still, the movie received a leading eleven nominations at that year’s Oscars (including for Best Picture and Best Director) and won Best Actor for Phoenix and Best Original Score for Icelandic musician Hildur Guðnadóttir. Joker is a divisive comic book movie, and understandably so. Coming from Todd Phillips, a generally-liked comedy director, it’s a film that takes so much of what fans of superhero flicks have come to expect and turns those expectations on their head in pursuit of crafting a gritty story about insanity, violence, and closing society off to those deemed “undesirable.” In other words, it’s one of those movies that’s not really enjoyable to watch yet works in spite of that. Yes, I’m someone who really likes Joker. Apparently, to some, this is a controversial opinion. Honestly, though, I’ve seen the film twice and struggle to be convinced by many peoples’ major criticisms of it. However, that’s probably a topic for another time. Because even if you don’t like Joker, it’s a movie that (in my humble opinion) will heavily influence how some filmmakers approach taking the comic book movie genre in a new direction going forward. First of all, Joker laughs in the face of those who describe other superhero movies such as The Dark Knight as “grounded.” It’s clear that Phillips’s intentions in making the movie was to capture a villain’s origin story on a plane of realism that most comic book films can only dream of (if they even try at all). In that regard, Joker is not a movie about the Joker—at least the comic book villain that Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Heath Ledger and (unfortunately) Jared Leto have portrayed. Rather, Joaquin Phoenix crafts a deeply troubled, lonely, and psychologically fragile man—Arthur Fleck—whose transformative break from reality puts him on the path to becoming the infamous archenemy of the “Caped Crusader” of Gotham. By doing so, Joker transcends its comic book roots in the ideas it explores and its visual and aesthetic homage to the hyper-realistic crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Whether or not that makes for a good movie is a matter of taste, but it certainly makes for a pretty unique approach within this genre of cinema that only films like Logan or The Dark Knight even come close to. Aside from Phoenix’s one-for-the-ages performance, I think the best part of Joker from a cinematic perspective is how well it uses the various elements of filmmaking to explore its themes and establish a distinctively dark tone and gritty atmosphere. The score, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, stands out as one of the more haunting uses of music (particularly during the bathroom scene) that I’ve seen in a drama in the last ten years. In addition, the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Lawrence Sher utilizes some incredibly inspired shot choices (the meaningfully awkward close-ups on Phoenix’s face, to be specific) to make the film exclusively from Fleck’s tragically distorted point of view. Simply put, these elements of moviemaking combine to create a tour de force of a character study that encapsulates so much of the anxieties of modern society which turn Fleck into a psychopathic killer. Again, you don’t have to agree with me that the film does this well. But, I think it’s safe to say that Joker has several artistic merits that alone make the movie worth watching. Furthermore, it cemented in the minds of Hollywood the reality that audiences want darker and grittier superhero stories (in the same way that Logan did). Regardless of your opinions of Joker, it’s difficult to deny the conversation that the film started and the fact that it’s commercial success proves how much the comic book movie genre is here to stay because it can branch out in such a different direction than Marvel Studios are doing. Image by Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay The Suicide Squad (2021)
Despite the negative critical response to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad that came out in 2016, Warner Brothers deemed it enough of a commercial success to warrant fast-tracking development on a sequel. As Ayer was intent on directing an all-female team-up film centered on Harley Quinn, the studio began the search for a director to the Suicide Squad sequel by early 2017 and considered figures such as Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom, Uncharted), Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies, Long Shot), and Mel Gibson (Braveheart, Hacksaw Ridge). By July of 2018, Catalonia native Jaume Collet-Serra (The Commuter, Jungle Cruise) was the new favorite to direct the sequel. However, after accepting Jungle Cruise and preferring to do an origin story (in the form of the upcoming Dwayne Johnson-led Black Adam), he left the project. A month later, Gavin O’Connor (Miracle, Warrior) was chosen to direct and co-write the film, but left by October to make The Way Back with Ben Affleck while also being frustrated that Warner Brothers was moving ahead with Cathy Yan’s spin-off film, Birds of Prey, that had a story remarkably similar to his script. By this point, Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Jared Leto were expected to reprise their roles of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Joker, respectively, despite the fact that the movie still lacked a director and shooting script. Around that same time, however, a miracle fell into Warner Brothers’s hands in the form of James Gunn (Slither, Guardians of the Galaxy). In October that year, after being fired by Disney from directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Gunn closed a deal to write and possibly direct a sequel to Suicide Squad. After initially expressing hesitancy due to the studio’s insistence that he direct a Superman movie, Gunn became more interested in working with DC when Warner Brothers gave him creative license to adapt any DC property that he wanted to. After choosing to make a movie about the Suicide Squad, Gunn was given near-complete creative control over the project (their main hope was that he would include Robbie’s version of Harley Quinn in the story). But the day after Gunn was officially hired to direct the film, Disney reinstated him as director of Vol. 3 and Gunn spoke with Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, who agreed to delay production on Vol. 3 for Gunn in return for Gunn agreeing to “make a great movie” in the Suicide Squad sequel. By January 2019, the film received its official title and release date (The Suicide Squad was Gunn’s joke title, but Warner Brothers liked it and agreed to it). Based on a three-page treatment, Gunn wrote several drafts of the screenplay which the studio very much liked. Gunn aimed to make the movie “its own thing,” as opposed to a direct sequel or full-on reboot, by not referencing the events of Suicide Squad or Birds of Prey while also not outright contradicting or retconning them. Aiming to make an R-rated superhero comedy (despite Warner Brothers insisting that it be PG-13), Gunn took inspiration from John Ostrander’s original “Suicide Squad” comic book run in the 1980s as well as 1960s war movies like The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. In choosing his team roster, Gunn spent days sifting through the library of DC Comics characters in order a formulate a team that would work well together while also ensuring that each of them felt like they were pulled out of different genres. Furthermore, he wanted his team to feel different from the characters in his two Guardians of the Galaxy films by making the audience uncertain of who would end up being bad or good. Several characters, from Deathstroke to Mr. Freeze, were rejected. Notably, he decided not to include the Joker because he felt that Amanda Waller would have no need to use him as part of the Suicide Squad. Regarding the story itself, Gunn wanted to take risks by making a film that “didn’t play by the rules.” To do this, he incorporated sequences from certain characters’ explicit points of view, an isolated subplot where Harley Quinn is separated from the rest of the action, and title cards to segue between scenes. When it came to the film’s primary antagonist, Gunn put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Waller and the U.S. government given the real-world history of American interventionism in underdeveloped nations. Initially interested in making Superman the big-bad that the Suicide Squad team goes to fight, Gunn ultimately chose to feature Starro the Conqueror as a character that he found both ridiculous and terrifying, but also he figured it was the only major DC Comics villain very unlikely that the character would be adapted by another filmmaker in the future. Furthermore, in deciding what characters to kill off, the studio gave Gunn permission to kill any character. However, Gunn did not want to give in to the temptation to not kill off any of the major characters in the end. Thus, he decided that Pola-Dot Man would be the best choice given his arc was the most complete by that point in the story. When it came to casting his Suicide Squad team, Gunn defend Ayer’s casting choices in spite of the overall negative reception of 2016’s Suicide Squad. First and foremost, Gunn wrote in Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Viola Davis’s version of Amanda Waller while Smith was revealed by February of 2019 to no longer be involved. In place of Smith’s version of Deadshot, Gunn met with Idris Elba to play a different character which Elba felt “honored” to be considered for the movie. Not long after, both Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney were preparing to reprise their roles of Rick Flag and Captain Boomerang, respectively, from Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Unlike Elba being cast as Bloodsport (Gunn was initially unsure which character Elba would play), Gunn wrote the King Shark character with Sylvester Stallone in mind. After Dave Bautista was busy filming Army of the Dead with Zack Snyder, Gunn oversaw negotiations for John Cena to play the role of Peacemaker after Gunn saw Cena’s performance in Judd Apatow’s comedy film Trainwreck. In April, David Dastmalchian and Daniela Melchior were cast as Polka-Dot Man and Ratcatcher, respectively, while Michael Rooker was in negotiations to play Savant in May. By September, the full cast was finalized and included Peter Capaldi as the Thinker, Pete Davidson as Blackguard, Flula Borg as Javelin, Nathan Fillion as T.D.K., Alice Braga as Sol Soria, and Sean Gunn performing motion capture for Weasel. Principal photography began in late September of 2019 at Pinewood Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, and lasted for about three months before moving to Colón, Panama for a month to shoot scenes on the streets of Corto Maltese. Gunn utilized many practical effects (especially compared to other comic book movies), such as for the scene of King Shark ripping a person in half. Filming wrapped in late February of 2020 in Porto, Portugal. According to Gunn, Warner Brothers never interfered with his creative process except for a few minor notes. Furthermore, he claimed that The Suicide Squad was the most fun that he had making a film due to being able to prioritize creativity over perfectionism, being in a good place mentally and emotionally, having a “stupendous” cast, crew, and producers, and feeling at the height of his directing talents. Released on August 5, 2021, The Suicide Squad was positively received by many critics due to Gunn’s direction and screenplay, and people generally agreed that it was a significant improvement over Ayer’s movie. However, the film was a box-office disappointment as it grossed less than 170 million dollars on a 185-million-dollar budget. Analysts surmised that the movie’s poor financial performance was due to anxieties about the COVD-19 pandemic, the movie being simultaneously released to stream on HBO Max, and some confusion among general audiences about whether the film was a sequel to or a reboot of its 2016 predecessor. In spite of its poor box-office performance, I think that James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad has immense potential to impact the future of comic book movies more than we may think right now. First off, it improves upon the success of the Deadpool films by turning away from relying almost exclusively on meta humor and out-of-left-field pop culture references. Instead, Gunn’s writing (combined with the performances of the cast) makes this movie undoubtedly one of the funniest comic book films ever made (the only other major contenders being Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy films and Taika Waititi’s Thor movies). But why is it funnier? Well, if you ask me, The Suicide Squad does what a movie like Deadpool does but better. Essentially, Gunn made a “soft parody” the superhero movies by subverting most of audiences’ expectations about what this kind of movie is. Whereas other comic book flicks spend two hours trying to invest you in the main hero’s journey and character growth, Gunn makes it clear from the get-go that you’re not supposed to empathize with most of these characters. Also, while other comic book movies use team-up scenarios for the payoff of seeing them work together, Gunn makes their teamwork the most chaotic and anti-climatic part of the movie (albeit in the best way). Essentially, The Suicide Squad is a great example of showing a different path that filmmakers can take within the superhero genre without being hyper-experimental so as to turn off general moviegoers. Undoubtedly, it’s one of the best things that DC Films has offered in the last decade (I’d throw the spin-off show, Peacemaker, into that conversation as well). Did it make a ton of money compared to other comic book movies? No, but I don’t think it needed to in order to leave its mark on the genre in the way that it did. Simply put, if DC and Warner Brothers can offer comic book fans creative visions as starkly different (but equally interesting) as Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Matt Reeves’s The Batman, then I wouldn’t count them out yet as being a solid alternative producer of blockbuster superhero entertainment. Certainly, there are other superhero movies that you could argue serve as predictors for where the genre is going. Whether it’s Zack Snyder’s four-hour director’s cut of Justice League, Matt Reeves’s crime epic The Batman, or Taika Waititi’s zany romantic comedy Thor: Love and Thunder, there is clearly still plenty of room for filmmakers of all different sensibilities and styles to innovate within the comic book genre and leave their mark on it for viewers of all ages and backgrounds to enjoy these kinds of blockbuster movies. And with so many superhero movies announced from Marvel, Sony, and Warner Brothers like The Marvels, Blade, The Flash, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we won’t have to wait long to see what comes next for superhero fans. Which of these comic book movies do you think best foreshadows where the genre is going for the next decade? What are some other recent superhero flicks that you think people should check out? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst “When you're dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That's what makes [Batman] so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.” – Christopher Nolan “When Patty [Jenkins] and I had our creative conversations about [Wonder Woman], we realized that [she] can still be a normal woman, one with very high values, but still a woman. She can be sensitive. She is smart and independent and emotional. She can be confused. She can lose her confidence. She can have confidence. She is everything. She has a human heart.” – Gal Gadot With the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the late 2000s and early 2010s, major studios with film rights to comic book heroes—from 20th Century Fox with X-Men to Warner Brothers with the DC characters—started to recognize the insane financial potential for creating a shared fictional universe involving crossovers of superheroes in team-up flicks. To varying degrees of success, the MCU sparked reboots and slow starts of cinematic universes from the DCEU to Sony’s modern Spider-Verse. So, as the summer blockbuster season winds down, I continue my exploration of the evolution of the comic book genre. In attempting to better understand the triumphant ascent of Marvel Studios’ superhero franchise, I will look at multiple movies that—to one degree or another—were the result of a ripple effect in Hollywood that inspired other studios to try and capture lightning in a bottle twice. So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for several movies. You have been warned.] - Image by ErikaWittlieb from Pixabay The Dark Knight (2008) For a summary of the production and release of The Dark Knight, click here. Having written about many Batman movies—including The Dark Knight—mere months ago, I’ll try to be succinct here. For my more in-depth thoughts about Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins, click that link above. Simply put, The Dark Knight can easily be described as a “perfect” film. Not literally, of course, as no such thing exists. However, it is by no means controversial for me to contend that the movie exemplifies some of the best modern filmmaking sensibilities in comic book cinema of the past twenty years. From its edge-of-your-seat pacing that never lets the audience lose where the story’s going to the expertly-crafted editing that heightens the suspense and emotional intensity when needed, Nolan’s direction comes together in every way possible to explore some heavy, relevant, and powerful ideas about order, chaos, and corruption. While not my personal favorite superhero flick, I don’t have a particularly strong argument for those who believe that The Dark Knight remains the most well-made movie of the genre. Without a doubt, I concur that it remains in the conversation of the pinnacle of what this genre can be. I know this was brief, so please refer to the above links for my more in-depth thoughts about The Dark Knight. I cannot stress enough just how important this movie is to the comic book movie genre, and I anticipate it will remain so for decades to come. Image by Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) As early as 2006, X-Men film producer Lauren Shuler Donner (Pretty in Pink, You’ve Got Mail) expressed interest in adapting the “Days of Future Past” storyline from two 1981 issues of Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men. After production completed on Matthew Vaughn’s prequel, X-Men: First Class, in 2011, Donner pitched this idea to Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Superman Returns), who directed the first two X-Men films, and by March of 2011 the treatment, which had been positive receive by 20th Century Fox, was in active development. Writer Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Sherlock Holmes) approached the screenplay for this project as laying the groundwork for the future of the X-Men franchise. Not only was this due to utilizing actors from the original trilogy and from First Class, but Singer also felt the use of time travel in this story to bridge the two casts was essential. To prepare, he studied time travels films (i.e. The Terminator, Back to the Future) in order to create a set of rules and make his script as plausible as possible. In adapting the “Days of Future Past” storyline for the big screen, Kinberg felt that it made more sense for Wolverine to travel in time (rather than Kitty Pryde, as the original comic had done) because of his healing abilities and the massive audience appeal of the character. Thematically, Kinberg also treated the villain characters as people who “may have been right with their fears” about mutants while also putting the heroes in a place where “they’re all lost and they’re trying to keep it together.” Originally attached to direct the sequel, Matthew Vaughn departed the project in October of 2012 in order to work on his adaptation of Mark Millar’s “Kingsman” comic book series for the big screen. Instead, Singer was brought back to the franchise to help the film after previously directing X-Men and X2: X-Men United. Before shooting began, Singer spoke with James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic) about time travel and the multiverse to prepare for the movie. By March of 2013, the main First Class cast (James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult) and many of the original trilogy cast (Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Shawn Ashmore, Elliot Page) were confirmed to be reprising their respective roles (it was not until December of that year that Singer confirmed Hugh Jackman’s involvement as Wolverine). In February, Peter Dinklage was announced as the film’s main villain and in May, Evan Peters was confirmed to be playing Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver. Principal photography lasted from April to August 2013, with much of the location shooting occurring in Montreal, Canada. In designing the costumes for the film’s 1973 sequences, production designer John Myhre (Elizabeth, Chicago, Dreamgirls) embraced the 1970s look in the way that First Class did with the 1960s. Specifically, the costumes for the First Class characters and Wolverine in 1973 were inspired by 1970s clothing (in stark contrast with the tactile battle fatigues of the original trilogy characters in the 2023 sequences). Released on May 23, 2014, X-Men: Days of Future Past grossed 746 million dollars at the box office on a 200+ million-dollar budget (making more money than both The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but falling about 27 million dollars short of Guardians of the Galaxy). To date, it is the third highest-grossing film of the X-Men franchise (only behind the two Deadpool movies). Critics were largely positive, particularly praising the story, action sequences, performances, direction, and themes. Fans also warmly received the film, with many of them feeling that it corrected the poor story decisions in prior films of the franchise (notably X-Men: The Last Stand). Receiving an Academy Award nod for Best Visual Effects, it became the first X-Men film to be Oscar nominated. In my first blog, I gave my thoughts on all thirteen films of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise. And while many of these movies (in my humble opinion) range from lukewarm to awful, Days of Future Past undoubtedly stands out as one of the better examples from Fox’s series that kicked off the modern era of comic book flicks with 2000’s X-Men. Looking back on Days of Future Past, I think that its biggest strength remains how well it acts as a celebration of the X-Men characters that spanned six films before. From the “original trilogy” characters like Anna Paquin’s Rogue and Halle Berry’s Storm to the First Class characters like Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique to the “crossover” characters like Professor X (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), Magneto (Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the film’s use of a time-travel plot to bridge those two worlds makes for some fun adventures and satisfying character-driven moments. Is it zany, and at times a bit ridiculous? Absolutely, but I think that Days of Future Past—better than most films of the series—pulls off an effective balance between meaningful storytelling and self-parody. Rather, the film has an energetic spirit that convinces you to, at the very least, enjoy yourself while watching the movie despite some questionable plot elements. While the story is fun, my personal favorite aspect of Days of Future Past is how it showcases some incredibly enjoyable character dynamics involving actors with great chemistry. Not only do we get some more solid, tense stuff between McAvoy’s Professor X and Fassbender’s Magneto, but by throwing Wolverine into the mix with the First Class cast the film builds on what came before from both generations of the franchise to create something new. It could have easily fell flat, but instead it excels (and is only made better by the inclusion of Evan Peters’s Quicksilver!). So, what is the legacy of Days of Future Past? Unquestionably, the film will be fondly remembered by comic book movie fans for doing the best it could to reconcile the criticisms original X-Men trilogy (particularly The Last Stand) in order to lay a new foundation for a hopeful future of the franchise. Did it ultimately pay off with Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix? Not in the slightest. But, that’s not this movie’s fault and therefore still deserves the credit for trying its hardest to make the best of a less-than-ideal creative situation. At the end of the day, will Days of Future Past be talked about in the same league as The Dark Knight or The Avengers? Probably not, but it certainly deserves some credit for pulling off a rather difficult narrative with genuinely warm character moments that offered a sliver of hope for what Marvel Studios can do with the X-Men characters. Hopefully, one day… Deadpool (2016) As early as May 2000, Deadpool was a character being considered for a big-screen adaptation working alongside Marvel Entertainment. By 2004, Ryan Reynolds (Blade: Trinity, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern 😊) was developing a movie centered on the “Merc with a Mouth” alongside writer and director David S. Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins) at New Line Cinema. However, despite support from studio executive Jeff Katz, the issues over rights to the character involving 20th Century Fox stalled the project indefinitely. It did not take long, however, for Fox to express interest in Reynolds making a cameo appearance as Deadpool in one of their X-Men films. This ended up being the infamous, poorly-received use of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Thus, in starting development on a solo Deadpool film after the opening weekend of Origins, Reynolds and producer Lauren Shuler Donner aimed to ignore that version of the character in favor of his more slapstick, metareferential roots. By early 2010, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland, Life) were hired to pen the screenplay for the film because Reynolds felt that they understood the tone for a Deadpool movie. After considering a few potential directors (notably Robert Rodriguez), Tim Miller (Terminator: Dark Fate) was hired to direct the movie in April of 2011 after his visual effects work on some of the X-Men films. By this point, Reynolds had also secured a deal to produce the film. In writing several drafts of the screenplay (one every year until it was finished), Reese and Wernick worked closely with Reynolds who was able to “catch” anything in the writing that he felt “doesn’t feel like Deadpool.” Despite their desire to not do an origin story, Reynolds felt that it was important to do one albeit differently than other films of the genre. Specifically, he wanted to frame the character’s origins by starting the film in medias res (“into the middle of things”) that uses the opening fight sequence as the catalyst for Deadpool narrating his own origin before using a “fast-forward button” to return the audience to where the film started: in the middle of the plot. When it came to the film’s wider place in the X-Men franchise, the film was intended to “stand independently” while also sharing continuity with the rest of the movies. Furthermore, Reese and Wernick thought it would do well to include a “straight man” X-Men character to act as a foil to Deadpool, deeming Colossus (who had received little focus in prior films) a good fit for this purpose. Other characters, notably Cable, were considered as villains for the movie but were either consolidated into pre-existing characters or reserved for a potential sequel. While the script was in its early rewrites, due to the critical and commercial failure of the superhero film Green Lantern in 2011 (in which Reynolds starred) the project was jeopardized due to the studio’s hesitancy to put a big-budget comic book adaptation with an R rating out of fear that it wouldn’t make back its money. But Fox also recognized (after several meetings) that altering the film to a PG-13 rating simply would not work for this specific character. Thus, they provided a “six-figure budget” to Miller to make some test footage. The footage was CGI animation with Reynolds voicing Deadpool, but ended up not swaying the studio to fund the project. After the release of Marvel Studios’ The Avengers in 2012, Fox considered incorporating Deadpool into a team-up movie due to their trepidations (which now included apprehensions over Reese and Wernick’s screenplay). Several big names in Hollywood, from James Cameron to David Fincher, expressed to Fox their support in the pitch and script but Fox remained hesitant to move forward. Thus, by July of 2014, the film had spent over ten years in “development hell” and its chances of being made became slimmer every day. That all changed when the test footage produced by Miller’s animation studio was leaked online. Due to the overwhelming enthusiastic fan response, Fox greenlit the film and gave it a 2016 release date by September that year. To this day, Reynolds and other involved with the project are unsure of who exactly leaked the footage yet many of them credit it with getting the movie made. However, Fox allowed Reynolds and his team creative control over the project in exchange for a much smaller budget than most other comic book movies were being dealt at the time. This budget cut from the studio required Reese and Wernick to edit out about nine pages from their most recent draft. Specifically, a motorcycle chase scene was cut and they added in the fact that Deadpool forgets his bag of guns leading up to the third-act fight in order to avoid requiring Miller to shoot an expensive shootout. Ultimately, however, the writers resolved that all of the cuts to the screenplay for the sake of budget ended up helping the film’s pace a lot. During pre-production, Miller focused much of team’s efforts on designing the Deadpool suit. Specifically, he and Reynolds aimed to make “the most faithful comic book to movie adaptation fans have ever seen” and deemed getting the suit right an essential part of this. However, in contrast with the unrealistically muscular look of Deadpool in the comics, Reynolds did not wear a muscle suit under the costume which Miller deemed was the character’s “quintessential” aesthetic. The costume was also designed with practicality in mind, such as the masks’ eyes being removable to make doing stunts in the suit more efficient. Principal photography commenced in Vancouver, British Columbia in March of 2015 and lasted until the end of May. By adding film grain to the digital footage in post-production, Miller and cinematographer Ken Seng aimed to give the film a “grittier” look than other superhero flicks. When it came to the dialogue, the actors (particularly Reynolds) improvised up to fifteen alternate jokes not in the screenplay. Notably, Reynolds’ improvisation about the studio being unable to afford another X-Man for the movie became Fox chairman Jim Gianopulos’ favorite line. Six disparate studios, from Digital Domain to Weta Digital, produced the film’s visual effects. Miller had these in mind, however, be making decisions on set with the amount of visual effects to be added in post-production a constant burden on his shoulders. While they often worked independently, all six studios collaborated on the third-act battle sequence in the wrecked helicarrier which Miller wanted to be the setting for the scene to expand the scope of the third act but had to ensure it looked “as different as possible from the one in The Avengers” to avoid legal issues with Marvel Studios. Made on a shoestring budget of 58 million dollars, Deadpool was released on February 12, 2016. The film became the highest-grossing film in the X-Men franchise and the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, earning over 782 million dollars at the box office (in both cases, it was surpassed by its sequel two years later). Critics were generally positive, with much of their praise directed at Reynolds’s performance and Miller’s direction (specifically the action sequences). However, some deemed the plot overly simplistic and some of the adult humor excessive. Despite being considered a serious contender for the Academy Awards, Deadpool received no Oscar nominations (possibly due to the lack of a campaign from Fox, a bias among Academy voters against comic book movies, and the strength of other more conventional contenders). However, the film cemented a legacy as the progenitor for other studios to consider the possibility that R-rated superhero flicks could have critical and commercial success. Today, fans of the genre credit the movie for laying the groundwork for other unconventional approaches to superhero movies in the future (notably Fox’s own Logan). Of the four stages that a film genre can evolve through, Deadpool is obviously the first great example of the third stage: parody. By embodying a hyper-meta-approach to its storytelling, director Tim Miller and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick pull off a very effective satire of blockbuster moviemaking, comic book flicks, franchises, and Hollywood in general. Without question, this remains the movie’s most significant quality when it comes to contextualizing it within the broader comic book movie genre. What is perhaps more impressive about Deadpool, however, is that it includes an actually heartfelt, well-intentioned story with a strongly genuine romance at its core. While the gratuitous humor and cartoonish violence ups the entertainment factor, the sweet and sexy romance between Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) and Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) elevates the movie to something more than just a raunchy, bloody superhero parody and instead it becomes relatable in spite of its extraordinary premise and narrative methods. To be honest, that’s really all I have to say about Deadpool. The film is a great example of how filmmakers with a coherent creative vision can make fun of the genre they’re playing in while also making a more-than-serviceable movie of that great. Furthermore, it’s an inspiring success story of a low-budget, R-rated comic book movie that undeniably made greater films like Logan and Joker possible. For that, Deadpool earns its legacy as a superhero flick that adults can enjoy. Image by Abderrahman Hadd from Pixabay Wonder Woman (2017)
More than twenty years before it finally came to fruition, development on a live-action film about Wonder Woman began with Ivan Reitman (Stripes, Ghostbusters) attached to produce and possibly direct. By 1999, novelist Jon Cohen (Minority Report) was attached to the project and Sandra Bullock (Speed, The Blind Side, Gravity) possibly starring in the title role. Over the next four years, screenwriters Todd Alcott (Antz) and Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island, Alita: Battle Angel) contributed to various drafts of the screenplay and other actresses, such as Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago, The Terminal), were considered for the lead. Starting in 2005, Joss Whedon (Toy Story, The Avengers) was hired by Warner Brothers to write and direct the film. However, after two years without finishing a screenplay, he left the project. Around the time of Whedon’s departure, the studio purchased a script that set the story in World War II. However, this was done primarily to retain their rights to the character as they did not want the film to be a period piece. By 2008, the studio was developing a Justice League project directed by George Miller (Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road) and starring model Megan Gale (Mad Max: Fury Road). However, the project stalled rather quickly due to production delays and budgetary issues. It was not until 2010 that Warner Brothers kickstarted their efforts to bring Wonder Woman to the silver screen. After many years hearing pitches and considering a variety of female directors, Warner Brothers hired Patty Jenkins (Monster) to direct the film based on a story that included the involvement of Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, Man of Steel) and Jenkins taking inspiration from the original Wonder Woman comics by creator William Moulton Marston, the 1980s modernization of the character from comic book writer George Perez, and Richard Donner’s Superman film from 1978. However, the character first appeared on the big screen in Snyder’s 2016 crossover film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice for which he cast Gal Gadot (Fast Five, Death on the Nile). Initially hesitant about inheriting an actress for the part in her film, Jenkins admitted to being very impressed with Gadot’s performance in Batman v Superman, saying: “They were looking for all the same things I would have looked for—all the values that Wonder Woman stands for exuding from someone in an honest way and boy did they find it… She shares every quality with Wonder Woman and that's no joke.” Principal photography for the film began in November of 2015 and lasted until May of 2016, with location filming occurring in England, France, and Italy. According to Jenkins, the aesthetic for the cinematography was inspired by the work of American impressionist painter John Singer Sargent and the movie was shot on film rather than digitally to capture an “epic grander escapism” for the environment and story. Due to being five months pregnant during reshoots, Gadot wore a green cloth wrapped around her stomach in order for her baby bump to be edited out during post-production. Released in May of 2017 on a budget of approximately 135 million dollars, Wonder Woman grossed over 822 million dollars at the global box office. Not only was it the tenth highest-grossing film of the year, but it was also the highest-grossing film by a solo female director until the release of Jia Ling’s Hi, Mom! in 2021 and the highest-grossing female-led comic book movie until Captain Marvel in 2019. Critics and audiences praised the film, specifically Gadot’s performance and her chemistry with Chris Pine (who played Steve Trevor), and it was generally viewed as a tonally hopeful and energetic film in stark contrast with other entries in the DC Extended Universe up to that point. Upon the film’s release, several high-profile figures both in politics and the film industry offered their take on Wonder Woman in terms of the extent to which it broke barriers for women in cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. Notably, director James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic) argued that there was nothing “groundbreaking” in the film and that Jenkins’s portrayal of the title superhero as “an objectified icon.” In response, Jenkins criticized Cameron’s characterization of her vision and the film overall, saying: “there is no right and wrong kind of powerful woman… if women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong and we aren't free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven't come very far, have we?” If you’ve read my blog about the DCEU from last year, you’ll know I am less-than-enthusiastic about Warner Brothers’s cynical and half-hearted attempt to replicate the success of Marvel Studios’s cinematic universe. But, there are some bright spots in this particular superhero franchise. And, while not my favorite comic book movie, Wonder Woman is certainly one of those bright spots. Largely thanks to the super-charismatic Gal Gadot’s lead performance and her chemistry with Chris Pine, the film is able to endear its audience to a likeable and relatable but flawed female superhero in a genre of cinema that, unfortunately, has lacked diverse representation of strong women for much of its lifespan. Thus, it succeeds in being a successful mainstream superhero movie led by a female actor. To be clear, however, I don’t fully disagree with James Cameron’s critique of the film. While I do think the movie is an important step in representation in this particular genre, it is by no means groundbreaking. Cameron is right to cite his character Sarah Connor from the first two Terminator films or his take on Ellen Ripley from Aliens in this conversation. Not only did they pull off the nuanced strong female action lead sooner than Wonder Woman, but (in my humble opinion) they did it better. That being said, I don’t want to take away from the importance of Wonder Woman. Clearly, it resonated with audiences in a way that Black Panther and Shang-Chi did by showing that any kid—no matter their skin color or gender—can see themselves in superheroes on the big screen. But that alone doesn’t make it a great movie. Important? Sure, but not great. In a way, I compare its significance to that of the first Blade film for being a much-needed step forward for representation in comic book movies at the time but has since been surpassed by films that pull off his feat better while also being more entertaining movies. These are just some of the better examples of how comic book movies began to change in the years following Marvel Studios coming onto the scene. Of course, there are others that may also predict where this cinematic genre is heading. Tune in soon to see what more recent superhero flicks, in my humble opinion, foreshadow the creative directions that studios and filmmakers might be taking in the next decade or two when it comes to crafting the next great comic book movie. Which of these comic book movies do you think serves as the best example of Hollywood’s response to the success of the MCU? What are some other post-2008 superhero movies that you think people should check out? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst “The truth is…I am Iron Man.” – Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) “I think that part of the reason that Iron Man was so successful was that we really chose to break new ground in a new area tonally…the way we depict the hero, what his abilities are. It felt fresh in a genre that is beginning to feel stale if it's not done with the proper amount of inspiration and a strong voice or tone.” – Jon Favreau Today, I continue my summer blog series about the history of the comic book movie genre by examining an important watershed moment in its modern evolution: the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Did comic book movies exist before 2008? Yes. Was the genre forever changed by Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios? Absolutely. In my humble opinion, the two films that laid the groundwork for not only Feige’s superhero cinematic universe but also the genre going forward are Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Since I have written about both of these films before, click here for my condensed thoughts on both Iron Man and The Avengers. So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for “Iron Man” and “The Avengers.” You have been warned.] Image by Bùi Xuân Trường from Pixabay Iron Man (2008) For a summary of the production and release of Iron Man, click here. While Christopher Nolan took the first step towards cracking the code for a great superhero origin story in 2005 with Batman Begins, Jon Favreau came along three years later and brought his own spin to this story. Ironically, both directors took rather similar characters (at least on the surface) to make wildly different movies tonally that both succeed on their own terms and remain essential to understanding the potential of this genre today. Whereas Nolan’s take on Bruce Wayne was that of an immature, self-isolating billionaire who channels his fear and torment about his tragic past into vigilantism for the greater good of Gotham City, Favreau reinvents the character of “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) to make audiences forever fall in love with his charm, wit, sarcasm, and narcissistic attitude. In other words, most producers today probably would not decide to kickstart a superhero franchise with a character like Tony Stark. But, I and many other fans are grateful for this choice. Unlike purely good characters such as Captain America or Superman, Stark is severely flawed. His near-psychopathic self-obsession pushes away any kind of stable support system with the exception of his personal assistant Virginia “Pepper” Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and corporate liaison to the military Lt. Col. James Rhodes (Terrence Howard). These mixed-bag relationships, along with his own actions towards others, help to define Stark’s character in the first act as the embodiment of class privilege and the military-industrial complex. Ultimately, it takes Stark’s own life being put in danger for him to fully understand how destructive his weapons technology can be in the wrong hands. With tons of help from fellow captive Ho Yinsen (Shaun Toub), Stark constructs a makeshift suit of weaponized armor that he uses to escape an Afghanistan cave. Upon returning home, his epiphany about the role he has played in the deaths of innocent people leads him to design a new kind of weapon: the Iron Man suit, which he plans to use to stop bad people from getting hands on his company’s weapons ever again. Similar to Bruce in Batman Begins, Stark originally discovers his “powers” for selfish reasons but through recognizing a systemic problem in the world comes to the realization that he could use his money, intelligence, and technology to try and solve that problem. Simply put, Iron Man helped establish the template for a superhero origin story that virtually all other films in the comic book genre since have tried to live up to (with relatively minimal success). Simply put, Iron Man doesn’t work without the stellar work from its cast. Of course, Downey, Jr. was born to play Stark and I don’t need to convince anyone who’s seen this movie of that. But I think the supporting cast, from Paltrow as the smart love interest and Howard as the grounding best friend to Bridges’ take on the classic zany villain, elevate the film above many other comic book movies that came before it. On top of just the great character work, Favreau’s direction helps inject a distinctive style befitting the character of Tony Stark. To match his lavish lifestyle and boisterous personality, Favreau and his creative team employ bright colors (most obviously the Mark III suit with an iconic hot-rod blend of red and yellow paint job) to reflect the film’s energetic nature. Furthermore, the inherent rock-star nature of Stark’s character makes Favreau’s reliance on a classic rock soundtrack (including the likes of AC/DC and Black Sabbath) such an inspired choice six years before James Gunn came onto the scene with his pop-rock sound for Guardians of the Galaxy. All of this plays to the film’s smart use of action. It’s clear from the get-go that Favreau knows the kind of superhero that he’s playing with. Due to the metallic form of Stark’s suit of power that inherently looks clunky and moves as such, the action is always kinetic while always feeling grounded in a hyper sense of reality created by a world in which Stark’s arc-reactor technology can even exist. Maybe it gets a bit over the top once Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) battles Stark in his customized “Iron Monger” suit, but this by no means takes away from the superbly entertaining cave breakout in the first act and the reveal of the Mark III (both on the ground and in the air) in the second act. On top of all that, however, Iron Man works best as the start to a billion-dollar movie franchise because it wasn’t trying to be that. With the exception of a handful of lines from S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and a fun cameo after the credits from S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the movie never tries to tease a sequel let alone lay the storytelling foundation for other origin movies set in the same universe. This is a lesson that other directors and studios (Zack Snyder and Warner Brothers, perhaps?) should have learned, yet virtually anyone else who’s tried to follow in Marvel and Feige’s footsteps have basically ignored it. All in all, Favreau sought not to kickstart a cinematic universe but simply make a good movie. And this is why Iron Man is so special: it’s a great movie on its own terms, but what it ended up starting elevates it to one of the best comic book movies to this day. The Avengers (2012)
For a summary of the production and release of The Avengers, click here. While I cannot excuse any toxic behavior that Joss Whedon may have exhibited in his career in Hollywood, I cannot deny how important he is in the comic book movie genre. As the writer and director of Marvel Studios’s first ensemble superhero flick, The Avengers, Whedon and his creative team managed to pull off what was impossible back then and remains incredibly difficult now: making a movie that brings a team of superpowered characters together that both pays off their individual stories while also crafting a solid action-adventure story in its own right. Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Avengers is just how much its writing and style lean into the inescapably corny nature of comic books as a storytelling medium. Whedon’s portrayal of these characters—Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), and Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner)—invokes snappy, quick-witted banter that manages to endear the audience to each of them. While this would be severely off-putting in virtually any other genre, the hyper-stylized reality that these characters exist in allows us to buy into all of it. Thus, Whedon’s screenplay crafts a specific kind of fictional universe that is unrecognizable in our world but is believable in theirs. In managing the charming and likeable interplay between the heroes, Whedon and his team of filmmakers created the template for how to do a good comic book ensemble flick. Not only are the dynamics between the characters believable (specifically Tony’s friendship with Bruce and his rivalry with Steve), but the way Whedon organically injects drama between them in the second act involving Fury’s secret S.H.I.E.L.D. weapons which leads to some awesome hero-on-hero battles (I particularly enjoy Natasha fighting off a brainwashed Barton and the Hulk facing off against the demigod Thor). Of course, those fights wouldn’t feel earned if not for the tragic death of Coulson and the increasing threat of Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) helping to bring the team back together. Specifically, Fury’s elaborate ruse to persuade Tony and Steve to overcome their differences and launch a last-ditch effort to save New York (and, by extension, Earth) from total destruction. Certainly, one can criticize some elements in The Avengers from the opening scene in which the S.H.I.E.L.D. base is destroyed to the dialogue feeling too prepared and inorganic. But all these criticisms fly in the face of this movie’s breathtakingly awesome third act. Simply put, nothing that arguably falls flat in the first two hours can sour or ruin the incredibly well-shot and well-edited Battle of New York culminating in the iconic “Avengers Circle” moment. Hands down, the six original Avengers united on the ground timed impeccably to Alan Silvestri’s theme song has gone down as one of the best moments in modern cinematic history (if not all time). The Avengers was released ten years ago, but remains up there with The Dark Knight and Logan as the pinnacle of superhero cinema despite being so tonally and stylistically different from those movies. Perhaps only surpassed within Marvel Studios by two of its sequels--Infinity War and Endgame—this film remains the gold standard for comic book ensemble flicks that no other studio or franchise, including Warner Brothers and DC or 20th Century Fox and X-Men, have surpassed. With Iron Man, Marvel Studios proved it could make a good superhero origin story. With The Avengers, the world was given pure movie magic with a fantastic team-up movie. Together, these films forever changed the comic book genre for the better and paved the way for the most successful film franchise of all time with some of the best superhero movies of all time, from Guardians of the Galaxy to Spider-Man: No Way Home. So, where does the genre go from here? Tune in soon to find out. 😊 Which of these pivotal Marvel Studios movies do you love more? What other movies in the MCU do you think are important to the comic book genre overall? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst |
Austin McManusI have no academic or professional background in film production or criticism; I simply love watching and talking about movies. Archives
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