Do superheroes need rescuing? The answer would appear to be “yes” on National Superhero Day – that’s today, April 28th, and it’s an actual thing, created by Marvel in 1995 to “honour superheroes, both real and fictional”.
Whatever about real superheroes – emergency workers, medical researchers, the guy who fixed the wonky controller on my Nintendo Switch last year – the comic-book variety have had a tough time of it lately.
To say we’re living through the twilight of the superheroes might be an overstatement. But they’ve been in the wars, particularly on the big screen, where it has become fashionable to decry Marvel, DC and all the rest as the harbingers of a cultural apocalypse.
Don’t take my word for it – ask Martin Scorsese, who singlehandedly begat the great superhero backlash by asserting that superhero films are “not cinema” and are closer to “theme park rides”. In other words, less Taxi Driver, more Tayto Park.
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Nobody would disagree with one of the greatest directors of all time. Nor is he alone in his wariness. “One of the things that has happened in the last few years is that the movies that typically make lots of money tend to be big franchises,” the actor Charlie Cox said in 2018.
“That means Marvel movies, DC movies, comic book movies … Harry Potter. Hollywood makes so many of these big franchises that there isn’t much space – literally cinema space – for smaller independent movies.”
The paradox, of course, is that Cox was speaking while promoting his leading turn in Marvel’s Daredevil, in which he played the eponymous crime-fighting lawyer, tortured Catholic and keen acrobat.
But while backlashes are often healthy, in that they challenge the status quo and upend received wisdom, it’s worth pondering whether all the superhero hate has gone too far, and if there’s a risk of throwing Batman out with the bathwater.
To those who love them – a club that obviously does not include Scorsese – superheroes are the essence of cinema itself. The first film I ever saw at a cinema was the original Christopher Reeve Superman, a film that upended my tiny, childlike mind.
Years later, my brain was detonated all over again by Tim Burton’s grimdark kitsch extravaganza Batman, which I watched three times in the cinema, a figure trumped by the even battier sequel Batman Returns (I went to see it four times in 10 days).
Those films were weird, warped and wonky – and they made the everyday world seem so much less mundane.
No, they haven’t weathered the years particularly well. Jack Nicholson’s Joker is broader than a barn door, while there are moments during Kim Basinger’s performance as Vicki Vale when it looks as if her soul has three-quarters left her body. But they offered something a Scorsese movie perhaps never could: pure, unrefined escapism.
The same is true of the grand cultural punching bag that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It has had its low points, of course – a great, dreary dribble of them, in fact, ever since the studio started pushing out content on Disney+.
Yet, at its best, the MCU is pure cinema gold, a rocket-fuelled thrill ride with quips aplenty and a pace that rarely lets up. Junk food for the mind? Maybe, but what’s wrong with bingeing on something tasty and throwaway? It isn’t a crime to enjoy a decent Hulk smash now and then. Or to look forward to the arrival in 2026 of a new Avengers, a Spider-Man prequel and a Supergirl reboot.
Comic-book movies stay with you, too. Nothing brings me back to my childhood more powerfully than John Williams’s Superman theme, a glorious, grandiose celebration of superherodom at its silliest. We would miss them if they were gone. The good news is that, despite what the detractors think, they’re not going nowhere.
