Movies | Television
Marvel’s Self-Doctored Doom
When the House of Ideas runs dry
I wasn’t old enough to watch the first Iron Man movie in the theater. By the time the second one came out, I couldn’t wait to enter the screening, agitated at the entrance. I don’t think I ever caught what they were about. Maybe emotionally I understood Tony Stark’s redemption arc and how he regained his heart, but I don’t think I thought about it that much as a kid. I was just excited to see a man wear an iron suit and fly around beating up other men in iron suits. Hearing the clanks of metal and the satisfying sound of a charged-up repulsor was enough. There was nothing else quite like it then.
But time has passed, and now I start to wonder if I should have left superhero movies behind, like toys in a toybox. While I grew to like different movies, some smaller than others, Marvel Studios got significantly bigger budgets and revenues over the years, which made modesty a virtue they couldn’t bear to handle. They got overconfident, and in their pride, meaning was lost in the machine.
From movies that barely make a profit to streaming shows that cost up to 200 million per season yet have middling receptions, under the purview of modern-day Disney, quantity now trumps quality. It is as if they feel they must constantly top themselves. Everything they churn out must reach higher heights — in other words, greed. This ultimately leads Marvel to recreate the magic of the past by literally summoning it to the present.
The doom is the past without a point
That is what they are currently doing with their cinematic pipeline. The failures of their recent endeavors post-Endgame have forced them to go crawling back to the old familiar well that is nostalgia. No Way Home was probably the only notable success in the 5 years, and unfortunately it set a bad standard for subsequent ideas, poisoning it with the premise that bringing back old actors from dead franchises and making them recite old lines was the missing link.
Once, Sir Ian McKellen’s superpower was the ability to make people believe that he could control metal. As his fingers stretch, prop guns turn into levitated computer-generated weapons, and the audience is oblivious. When audiences watch him, they don’t believe that men can flip cars and trucks with movie magic. They believe that he could do these things — not the actor, but Magneto, the master of magnetism, mutant revolutionary. There is no reverence for reality-feigning feats anymore. Sophisticated movie artistry is taken for granted. These days, adoration is reserved for the gone.
When Sir Patrick Stewart or Tobey Maguire shows up on screen in a dragged-out medium shot waiting for an ovation, they are not their characters. They are not representatives of the story. They are not metaphors of systemic discrimination or the burden of responsibility. Instead, they represent an era of film, especially superhero films, one that exists in the audience’s imagined past, a utopic juncture when they were younger.
Marvel’s new magic trick is not to turn someone green or make people fly, it is to bring back the past. The infinite possibility is no longer superpowers, but self-reference. Intra-studio pats on the back and retroactive reverence for expired franchises, that is at the forefront. When we watch a movie, it is no longer just a movie, but an event pointing at itself, extending a mirror to its past.
We were once fooled into believing that a man with no heart could not only love but also be a self-made superhero. Now we are asked to suspend our disbelief further and think that that same actor is not paid millions more every time a different masked man is on screen. We are asked to not be cynical about this creatively bankrupt decision. For those late to the news, Robert Downey Junior has been officially cast as Doctor Doom, the main antagonist for the next Avengers movie, directed by the people who made the last two. Does casting the same big-name actor for a different fan-favorite character have a point? Yes, it raises eyebrows and pulls people into seats. It’s a calculated risk by the board and focus groups I suppose.
The doom is appearance without essence
These Marvel movies are no longer about something, they’re about the same thing, letting go by holding on. This contradiction is at the core of every multiverse extravaganza. They attempt to be love letters to things that never needed one. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most recent culprit, saying goodbye to the Fox superhero movies, yet seemingly employing Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine for future gasps and claps.
They tell us that anything can happen, except apparently anything new, as the multiverse is only an anagram for a variant of something you’ve seen before. And what they consider new is just two or three things from the past being in the same room for the first time and having a chat together, which is fan service at best and fan fiction at worst. Only inciting reactions, it is devoid of pathos, leaning heavier towards pastiche.
It’s telling that the main antagonist of Deadpool & Wolverine, Cassandra Nova, is not even accompanied by her twin brother, Professor X. Neither of the character’s two actors return, not for a second of screen time. The space for returning Fox characters is relegated to the theme of saying goodbye to the past or making peace with it. Ironic that they keep saying goodbye to things that people have moved on from years or even decades prior. They are patient zero to the cure they sell. There are not even significant changes or character development from these returning heroes. Even catchphrases are recycled. The only exception is Channing Tatum’s never-before-seen Gambit who here is like a rejected script that won the lottery and gets to say a few lines in a blockbuster movie. Any larger thematic beat or story potential with the main villain, one of the only interesting inclusions, is ignored completely in favor of this.
Disney has discovered a shortcut to billion-dollar success, one that saves time and bypasses the need for build-up, just paychecks for previous actors. They don’t require new memorable lines, just copy and paste from past scripts. No Way Home was perhaps their eureka that started this whole trend, setting a horrible standard for things to come, a new rule for the production line.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s easy or artless, but making iconic scenes is not the same as putting together past icons to make a scene. What once was iconic because it’s well made is now just iconic because it repurposes what was well made in the first place.
This begs the question: can something new that mostly uses everything old compare to that which it borrows from? Can a franchise Frankenstein stand the test of time?
At least No Way Home had some things going for it. It was new for one, and its creativity was that nobody had done what it did before. It was the first to make the impossible happen. Bringing the past back unscathed to handshake the present was nothing less than a movie miracle. The closest thing might have been Days of Future Past to a certain extent, bringing old casts together with the new.
But each time they do this meeting of different eras, things get more pointless. These events should be exceptions, not the rule. Yet if they’re the only thing making this much money, then they’re going to be the only things that production companies will churn out. Money talks and art listens, it increasingly seems to be.
Nostalgia works differently for different people. It’s not timeless, as by definition it is tied to a certain time. Some people might be happiest to see Blade return on screen, arguably the first real Marvel blockbuster, while others might be most joyous to witness Gambit’s lost potential finally come to fruition. Just like there are Keaton fans and Affleck fans, with all three Spider-Men showing up, it’s a guarantee that everyone will be pleased. In theory, every target market is checked off the list.
But by catering to nostalgia, these movies drop the chance to be something that future fans could be nostalgic about. People would keep being nostalgic about the things that current movies are pointing backward at, leaving the audience stuck in a time loop at every theater entrance.
It isn’t a coincidence that of all the multiverse movies that have come out, the only one that looks particularly distinct and uses the multiverse as more than an engine for emotional time travel is Spider-Verse. It is the only one that doesn’t indulge in cameos from past movies and uses the plot point for artistic extremes, through its visuals and animation. The rest look like they were shot in a blue backyard with a static shot to make for easier CG replacements in case the actors change.
The advent of superhero streaming creates a new avenue for storytelling, with big-budget actors playing for a smaller screen. However, in reverse, the big screen now seems to follow the look of TV, with everything lacking in dynamic lighting. I guess there’s no room for creative cinematography when it needs to be crystal clear that a generation’s childhood just entered the scene wearing an actor’s weathered face.
The doom is fear for the future
What would make a child ask their parents to take them to see Iron Man? Is it because it’s played by Robert Downey Junior? No. It’s because it’s a superhero movie — it’s fantastical, inspiring, and fun. Back then they were hard to come by. Now, it is as if Marvel is insecure about their output. Kids would watch superhero movies either way, regardless of the actors, but it is the adults, those who grew up with these movies, that Marvel still can’t let go of. They still want us to be part of their demographic. And so they put in Robert Downey Junior, because now when we take ourselves to movies it isn’t enough that it’s a superhero movie. We’ve seen plenty. Now what Marvel sells isn’t an escape into a fantasy world where anything can happen, it’s two hours of time travel to the past, where what can happen is either what we’ve seen before, the Jackmans and Maguires, or what the internet wants to see, the Cavills and Krasinskis. What Disney peddles is our childhood.
Self-reference is the name of the game. The new trend has the backward idea of making the audience realize that they’re watching a movie, producing an unnecessary distance that the presence of the screen already provides. This detracts audiences from the narrative, as winking easter eggs are an occurrence that only the audience understands and not the characters the audience is supposed to relate to.
While superhero movies used to be about immersing the audience with top-of-the-line effects, now the budget is allocated less to this seamless transference and more to returning stars, reshoots, and last-minute edits. Characters are reduced to catchy one-liners, interchangeable for the audience's applause on the red carpet and at-home reel reenactments. Instead of surprising people with something new, people point at the screen and are surprised by what’s old. The past is commodified into a purchasable, repeatable illusion. A trip that you can buy more tickets to revisit.
This uber-reverence for the past is based on insecurity. The bigwigs doubt their current ideas could compete with the cult following of their previous victories. Ignorant of the fact that what worked in the past was only successful because it was new and relevant to its time, and bringing it to the present makes it an anachronistic relic, derivative, and desensitizing. But one of the actors had a well-reported off-screen beef with Ryan Reynolds, someone noted, so he had to make an appearance. They just had to write that joke in. It’s self-awareness doubling as a shield against criticism. That is why Deadpool is the perfect outlet for Marvel’s reference machine as it can deflect any flak with its 4th wall breaks.
This hyper fixation on what’s behind doors that have closed costs everyone. When everything depends on this gimmick, all other sections are sacrificed, from VFX to set design. The budget is spent on making an event and not a movie. And as with rollercoaster rides, the first time creates a thrill unlike any, a collective rush. Unlike movies, however, by the second and third go around, there is nothing new under the sun. With no cheers to distract you, the rewatch washes over like blowing wind. Art should not whittle away with each experience, it shouldn’t be spent. When everything is for the sake of an opening weekend, something is lost that can only be noticed in hindsight.
Creativity blossoms in limitations. Back when Marvel didn’t have the film rights to their money makers, Spider-Man and the X-Men, they had to make do with B-listers. In their struggle, they built stars from scraps, making characters like Iron Man into household names. They made actors rise through the ranks by wearing spandex super-suits. Now that they have bought every character, and can afford any actor, they hire the same one that was there from the start.
Their almost-monopoly on superhero media makes them lazy. They have too much power and don’t know what to do with it. They keep underhandedly telling us the best days are behind us, and with their current output, they might be right.
How many have imagined the ability to reach out and hold something from far away? To possess an invisible power. To mean something. To make a difference. Superhero movies were once a path to this dream, fulfillment through rich fictional inner lives that mirror our own, giving us something to reflect upon. They used to inspire us to take agency in our lives.
But recently, cameos and characters from corporate mergers prove that you're not special. Only your old childhood heroes matter. Only the brand they brandish lasts forever. Spider-Man needs old Spider-Men. And the spotlight is reserved for twinkling stars whose light still reaches today. The past can't let us go, and we keep paying for it.
