The contamination of the superhero concept
July 2025
The Fantastic Four: First Steps could change the MCU "forever" – MSN Total Film
"FF First Steps] arrival will ... signal the first step toward the presumed end and rebirth of the Multiverse in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, which draw on classic comic stories that remade aspects of Marvel Comics continuity. And with the close of the Multiverse Saga, I'm sincerely hoping that the Fantastic Four will be the vanguard of what comes next, with a renewed focus on characters, and creators with a unique vision being allowed to build an entire, captivating world around their story."
The article gives a nice long history of the FF and the importance of Marvel's first big superhero success in comics way off in the past transferring successfully to the big screen now (of course, right now, any kind of success is probably welcome over at Disney/Marvel).
The first teaser trailers for FF stirred up a lot of positive response, but subsequent marketing activity hasn't expanded on that, if anything, there's been some backtracking in reactions. It'll all be moot once the film hits theaters and the reviews, social media punditry and word-of-mouth takes over. But if James Gunn's Superman does well (it comes out first on July 11, FF on the 25th), the nice feeling from a successful superhero movie might leave a strong, happy wake for FF First Steps to surf on.
"Rebirth of the Multiverse" scares me, though, because the concept was gobbling up the superhero genre entirely while simultaneously profit-earning superhero films were becoming rare items at theaters over the past years. In fact, the core of 'power phantasy' superhero storytelling had shifted away from essentials into this sci-fi concept, and then getting larded over with 21st century soap opera melodrama. The combination was not only making for rather unintelligible stories but burying the genre under the emotional baggage of two other genres (the sentimentality of "romance" and the tangled up emotional bloviating of "family drama"). There's no reason a superhero saga can't include these other story modes, but its got to keep the dominate reason the story is being told front and center, otherwise we're getting a tale that looks like a superhero film but its actually something else entirely. The contamination of the superhero concept is pretty easy to spot once the heroes start turning out to be nincompoops and asses and the various characters gathered around them are preoccupied with non-superhero cause-and-effect issues, and the moral imperative of squashing the bad guys has faded.
Of course, lousy film-making doesn't help, and DC-Sony-Marvel films for awhile now have been trying hard to be completely in line with Martin Scorsese's accusations, and at the same time being examples of poor craftsmanship, especially in the storytelling department, all of these things creating a Perfect Storm of failure.
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Original article June 2025 | Page start Nov 28, 2025