Supah dupah

Five years ago, Hollywood’s henchmen released the third film in the Spider-Man trilogy, wrapping up Peter Parker’s whimsical tale and ensuring that there would never be another Spider-Man movie, ever.
Until they made another one.

With new actors, a new script, new director, and probably a new pastry cart, the vague entity that is Hollywood decided the Spider-Man franchise needed what’s called a “reboot.” That’s when a character or movie series is given a re-imagining, a fresh take with a fresh new approach and, yes, fresh pastries. (Never write a column before lunch.)

The movie industry has done this before with a superhero franchise, most notably with Batman. The original series, which started out marginally less than embarrassing, devolved into a hammy and pathetic costume party populated by hollow-eyed actors grimly collecting paychecks. The new series is a dramatic improvement, and unlike the Spider-Man reboot, has the benefit of occurring more than ten minutes after the release of the last.

Even so, you have wonder when it’ll all end.

Not just the incessant rebooting, which is getting annoying in its own right, but the superhero craze in general. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily looking forward to the demise of the superhero film as a genre – I’ve seen more than a few, and I generally enjoy them – but realistically, they can’t go on forever. There’s only so many times you can tell Spider-Man’s origin story before audiences lose interest, and once you’ve exhausted the storytelling possibilities for the more popular characters (Iron Man, the X-Men, et al.), then which comic book heroes do you turn to for cinematic inspiration? The Red Bee? Squirrel Girl? Who would enjoy those movies? I don’t even enjoy admitting those characters are real.

Eventually, the superhero movie will go the way of that now-dormant genre from yesteryear: The western.
Westerns used to be all over the place, and for a simple reason: They were cheap to make. Grab a handful of character actors, give them giant hats and horses, and stage some shootouts on an inexpensive ghost-town lot in the California desert, and voila, you’ve got yourself a western. You can’t flip the channel to AMC these days without catching a glimpse of these remnants of cinema’s past, complete with scraggly beards and tobacco-drenched spittoons. Growing up, there was rarely a Saturday afternoon when I didn’t catch my father engrossed in one of these relics, dutifully following the exploits of Sonny the Hardscrabble Cattle Wrangler, or whoever was the gunslinger of the day. Forty years from now, I imagine film buffs of the current generation will be found similarly rapt, only instead of rooting for Clint Eastwood, they’ll be cheering on a sexually ambiguous vigilante who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants.

We have modern special effects to thank for the deluge of protagonists who look like they’re made of candy. Without computer-generated effects, there would have been no plausible way to do, say, Iron Man; Robert Downey, Jr. would basically have been playing an aerial version of RoboCop, and the rudimentary green-screen technology used for the flying sequences would have prompted theater owners to hand out a barf bag along with each ticket. Actually, considering the quality of the recent Green Lantern movie, that may not be a bad idea anyway.

The problem is that the newfound ability to depict these superheroes accurately is leaving the market saturated. And I say this as a huge fan of some of these characters.

Yeah, I was a comic book kid. With thick glasses and a body mass index that would have made Jonah Hill bow and call me god, I pretty much had to be. My pre-teen years were littered with dog-eared copies of Batman and Wolverine, and what appealed to me then still appeals to me now: The adolescent, flamboyant fantasies embodied in the grim scowls of dudes with masks and attitudes. This stuff still tickles the ten-year-old boy in me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But, as with anything that tickles, you can’t breathe if it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to see these movies come to an end; I just wish Hollywood would pace itself. Too much of a good thing leads to wistful nostalgia marathons on AMC. Just ask Clint Eastwood.