residentpyromaniac

Because it's clearly a bubble. It kind of makes me wonder if this is what it felt like with Westerns back in the 80s or so. People are going to look back in a few decades and go, "Man, the 2010s sure loved their superheroes." (I figure 2010s is the best blanket guess here. Iron Man really kicked it all off, and that was released in 2008. Close enough.) At most, I hope it ends like the Western trend did in the 80s, by slowly petering off until there aren't enough being released in a given year to count as a trend anymore, and not like the last trend of superhero movies did, with Superman IV just about killing them for somewhere around 15 years.

I'm sure there's been longer and more interesting analyses of why superheroes are so popular these days. My best guess basically boils down to, people want relatively simple stories while living in a world where the news seems to bring a relentless barrage of misery and outrage, because that's what gets the clicks. Stories where Evil is one specific person who can get punched until they stop are probably appealing.

A more cynical part of me thinks it's also partly because it's much, much easier to market a movie with existing, long-established characters than it is to sell something completely new. A major studio could probably slam out a trailer for the most random D-Lister from DC or Marvel's roster, and within hours there would be a hundred articles along the lines of "What is Etrigan? All you need to know for the upcoming blockbuster!"

(A digression: I really, really doubt that an Etrigan movie is ever going to be made. But it would be pretty cool, if anyone could swing it.)

And sure, Marvel as a whole has had much more success with the movies in general, but I think that's largely because DC doesn't feel like it's trying as hard. They've got a solid, if more niche, source of income from adapting existing comic lines to straight to DVD/streaming animation and by all accounts they plan to keep doing that. It wouldn't surprise me if they weren't pushing the live-action films as hard because of that.

EDIT: I accidentally hit enter and published this before I finished my train of thought. Whoops.

Not that I had much further to go with this. My main thoughts were that as much as my nerd ass loves these superhero movies (I grew up basically learning to read on DC and Marvel's Silver Age comics, it was inevitable), I know this trend is most likely unsustainable in the long term. People will probably get tired of over-the-top comic book style absurdity after a while.

I kind of wonder what the next genre trend will be.