The Decline of Super-Hero Movies

 Every weekend I block out two hours for writing, and I should be using that time editing my book today, but I'm really not enjoying writing that book, and thinking of abandoning it altogether, so instead I'm doing another blog post to procrastinate from that other project.

Some say we have super hero fatigue.  Less super hero movies are being made, after years of flooding the market.  James Gunn says that it's not fatigue for super-hero movies.  We just need good stories.  

Super hero movies have been with us since the days of the serials in the 1940s.  Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Captain America all got serials, along with non-super comic book characters like Blackhawk, Hop Harrigan, and Dick Tracy.  

For decades, it seemed as though the super-hero movies were focused on Superman and Batman.  

That changed in 2000 with the release of X-Men.  Many will say that Blade in 1998 was the start, and that may be true, but I really feel the success of X-Men led to the barrage of Marvel movies that came out in the early 21st century, leading to the MCU in 2008.  

The success of the MCU led to the DCEU, which for once focused on more than just Superman and Batman, as well as other, numerous comic book movies from comics that weren't from the big two.  

TV also became dominated with comic book projects, most notably the Arrowverse franchise.  

The barrage of super-hero movies seems to be slowing down.  Sony tried but failed to be a success in their non-Spider-Man Spider-Verse.   Many other studios tried to have shared universes with other properties, not super-hero but in the same spirit, the most successful being the Godzilla/Kong Universe.

But is the era of super-hero movies going the way of the western?  Westerns dominated film and TV for decades, and then faded away.  We still get a western now and then, but it's nothing like it was.  

Is this what we can expect from super-hero movies?  James Gunn is just starting a new shared super-hero universe.  But is it too late?  Are audiences done?  And what of the MCU?  There's still a lot of projects out there, but audiences have not been kind with most of their recent releases.  

Maybe we are just seeing a dip, and a resurgence is coming.  Superman and Fantastic Four both got a lot of hype, a lot of haters, and a lot of love.  

Only time will tell.