We do not copy the Hollywood production [sic], we create our own mythology, based on our own historical cultural code. In our case it is a common Soviet past of tens of millions of people. That’s why we have several characters that represent different republics of the former Soviet Union…In order to [ask the] question: ‘Who of the superheroes do you like most?’ The answer of our child, for example, was ‘Russian Arsus’ rather than Superman or Batman.
– Sarik Andreasyan (qtd. in Sahay 2017)
What bothers me most, is that it’s always here to show the supremacy of America, and how they are great. I mean, which country in the world would have the guts to call a film, ‘Captain Brazil’ or ‘Captain France?’ I mean, no one. We would be so ashamed and say, ‘No, no, c’mon, we can’t do that.’ They can call it ‘Captain America’ and everybody thinks it’s normal. I’m not here for propaganda, I’m here to tell a story.
– Luc Besson (qtd. in Gunderman 2017)
Writing a monograph about something as expansive and as contemporary as the superhero films and television shows created by Marvel Studios, as one might expect, presents a variety of challenges, chief of which might be an acknowledgement of the remarkable pace with which new texts are added to the MCU. In 2008, Marvel released only two films, their first as a fully-fledged and independent studio, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, but by 2017 the frequency of additions had become almost overwhelming, with a major new release in nearly every month of the year. Between January and May of 2017 audiences were able to watch the twenty-two episodes of Season Four of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which were divided into three distinct but overlapping ‘pods’; then in March the much criticised Iron Fist, the fourth and arguably least successful of Marvel’s Netflix collaborations; in May James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 which was even more financially successful than the original and made close to a billion dollars world-wide; in July Spider-Man: Homecoming brought the iconic web-slinger firmly into the world of the MCU and also featured Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark/Iron Man for the seventh time (eighth if one counts his cameo in The Incredible Hulk) in ten years and in a major film for the third straight summer in succession; in August Netflix’s The Defenders, featuring the stars of all of its four previous shows onscreen together; in September The Inhumans (ABC, 2017–), which, even though it was a television show, debuted its first two episodes in IMAX cinemas all over the globe; in October Thor: Ragnarok, the conclusion of the Thor trilogy which had started in 2011, bringing back Loki but also integrating the Hulk into its narrative in ways which would have considerable ramifications for Avengers: Infinity War to be released the following year in 2018; and in November the Netflix series The Punisher, in which the brooding antihero originally introduced in Season Two of Daredevil returned to the television screens in his own series. All of these films and television programmes, more than fifty hours of screen time, are set in the same diegetic world, one which was established by Jon Favreau’s Iron Man back in 2008.
It is Marvel, more than any other production company, that has fuelled what we have seen described both as a ‘resurgence’ (Chermak et al. 2003: 11) and a ‘renaissance’ (Green and Roddy 2015: 2), but also a ‘cultural catastrophe’ (Alan Moore qtd. in Flood 2014) and a ‘cultural genocide’ (Iñárritu qtd. in Fleming Jr. 2014). In 2011 Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou called the phenomenon a superhero decade (2011: 1), but given its longevity we need to acknowledge the necessity of turning their use of the singular ‘decade’ into the plural ‘decades’. This volume has attempted to outline and interrogate the ideological parameters of the MCU, but also provide a critical framework designed to transcend the films and television shows contained within it, with much of its analysis just as applicable to future Marvel productions and to other entrants to the superhero genre, whether it is the films of the DCEU (2013–), the X-Men series (2000–), or even those made in other countries, many of which engage with the motifs explored in this book in compelling ways. While we have correctly categorised the superhero renaissance as being a primarily American one, its audience has been extraordinarily global and only the first three MCU films made more money in the US than in international markets, something that is highly unlikely to ever happen again. As a result of the genre’s tremendous financial success and cultural impact it comes as no surprise that other national film industries have sough to create their own superhero films in an attempt to return domestic audiences to indigenously produced narratives. Japan’s Ultraman: The Next (2004), Casshern (2004) and Gatchaman (2013), Finland’s Rendel (2017), Malaysia’s Cicak-man (2006), Denmark’s Antboy (2013), Thailand’s Mercury Man (2006), Italy’s They Call Me Jeeg (2015), and Britain’s SuperBob (2015) and iBoy (2017), to name just a few, are superheroes as intrinsically connected to their own cultures as the MCU is to the turbulent new millennial decades of the United States. They are texts which should be understood as manifestations of their own unique national identities and monomyths, but impacted upon and influenced in complicated ways by the domination of the superhero form by the American cultural industries which undoubtedly stands at the very apex of the genre. In this understanding the relationship between, for example, a Russian and an American superhero film, or an Indian and an American superhero film, is a distinctly transnational one that should be considered, as Anurima Chanda commented, not as an example of ‘marginal cultural production’ based on ‘mimicking’ (2015: 70), but rather as a process of transcreation or cross pollination understood as ‘a transnational and translational instantiation of the superhero embedded in familial and vernacular conventions’ (Kaur 2013: 293) of their own cultures.
Thus, the Russian superhero film released internationally with the English title of Guardians (2017) is quite palpably a response to the deluge of American superhero films which have flooded Russian multiplexes in recent years and was billed as ‘Russia’s answer to Marvel’s superhero adventures’ (qtd. in Ryan 2017). Made on a budget of just $5 million dollars, not much more than the cost of a single episode of Daredevil, Guardians features a team of disparate superheroes as co-protagonists created by a secret Soviet organisation called ‘Patriot’ during the Cold War, but, as one might imagine, its enemies and the fears and anxieties it dramatises are quite different to those found in films like Iron Man and The Avengers. The four superheroes at its centre are self-consciously designed as representative of the different nationalities which comprised the former Soviet Union and are shown to embody what is commonly regarded as the qualities and traditions (and even the natural resources) of the region where they are from. Therefore, the Armenian Ler (whose name means mountain in Armenian) has the ability to manipulate stone and soil and is first seen meditating at Khor Virap at the foot of Mount Ararat; Khan is the proud and mysterious Kazakh who is said to have killed his brother in a blood feud, but can command the wind, teleport and is a master with all forms of blades; Ksenia, the only female on the team, has the power to become invisible and mould her form to any substance that she touches (she even jokes that her extra superpower is ‘I make an excellent borscht!’); finally, Ursus, the Bruce Banner-like genius Russian scientist, is able to transform into a huge bear, the most potent Russian symbol of all. The film embraces the thematic tropes of the superhero film but offers its own variations on them and is inextricably connected to Russian culture and ideology with its evocations of World War II, the Cold War and its Moscow-set climax, a city with perhaps an even more vivid and traumatic history for Russian audiences than New York has for Americans. It is not a coincidence that the film was released on 23 February, the Russian public holiday known as ‘День защитника Отечества’ (‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’), and the film’s title could just as accurately have been translated as Defenders. The film opened at number one at the Russian box office with respectable earnings of $3.7 million in its first weekend, but was quickly eclipsed by a wave of American superhero films released in the weeks after, starting with Logan which earned $7.7 million across the same time period and those other guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, which opened to $12 million in their opening weekend. These cases are examples of the issues facing many national film industries and markets all around the world, where audiences overwhelmingly tend to prefer American films to those produced in their own country. In 2016, Russian films occupied just 17.8% of the national market share (up from 15% in the previous year) and only a single Russian film appeared in the Russian top twenty-five box office in 2016 (see Holdsworth and Kozlov 2015; Barraclough 2017). In the UK, the situation is even worse, despite annual assurances by the British Film Institute that the British film industry is booming, as independently produced British films were only able to secure 7.4% of the total box office in 2016, down from 10.5% in 2015 (see Anon. 2017b).
Fig. 38: Guardians (2017) offers Russian variations on the superhero narrative with its band of disparate heroes from all corners of the former Soviet Union united against an apocalyptic threat
In the last decade it is the Indian film industry which has, outside of the United States, produced the most superhero films and for Indian audiences the genre has been largely defined by the phenomenal success of Koi…Mil Gaya (2003), Krrish (2006) and Krrish 3 (2013). The films, directed by Rakesh Roshan and starring his son, Hrithik Roshan, have become one of the biggest franchises in Indian film history, expanding beyond the cinema to television, comics and video games. As we have habitually seen with the American film industry, the films have become bigger as the series progresses: with larger budgets, more characters, increasing amounts of special effects and more and more elaborate action sequences. The trilogy draws extensively and fairly explicitly on American superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman, but also on American films as diverse as First Blood (1982), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and The Matrix, with even their soundtracks leaning rather heavily on Alan Silvestri’s score for The Avengers and Hans Zimmer’s for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) for inspiration. Krrish and Krrish 3 follow the adventures of the pure-of-heart Krishna, who inherits superpowers from his father (who had been gifted them by an alien), as he moves from a rural Indian countryside idyll to embrace his destiny as a superhero in the modern metropolitan of Mumbai. However, its depiction of India is very different to that of The Avengers with Banner’s sojourn to the slums of Kolkota. Krishna becomes the masked superhero known as Krrish, who is constructed as a particularly Indian superhero who embodies and articulates Indian religious beliefs in ways very far removed from the secular humanism of the MCU superheroes. Hinduism not only informs Krishna’s name, but also his values and what he comes to represent to the local community who he serves and who come to revere him. He tells those he saves, who are most often women and children, that they too are Krrish and that ‘Anyone who takes away tears and spreads happiness is Krrish’, which culminates in a remarkable scene in Krrish 3 when a statue is erected in his honour with the inscription ‘Superhero of India’ at its base in English. While offering some similarities to the statue of the Avengers at the end of Age of Ultron, the film shows a large crowd assembling around the figure breaking into the song and dance number, ‘God, Allah, Aur Bhagwan’, with the three gods in its title embodying the extent of the film’s immersion in religion. The lyrics of the song suggest, ‘He’s in me too. He’s in you too. Somewhere or the other, he’s there in all of us’, but whether they refer to Krrish himself or broader Hindu deities, remains ambiguous, as even though Krrish is portrayed as godlike throughout the series (his appearance is often prefaced with lines like, ‘God, please help us!’) the implication that Krrish and Krrish 3 offers is not that Krrish is a deity, but rather he is an instrument of god and a living embodiment of the religious faith of the Indian people.
Fig. 39: “Anyone who takes away tears and spreads happiness is Krrish”: The Hindu “Superhero of India” in Krrish 3 (2013)
Krrish 3 mounts an impressive spectacle on its, by Hollywood standards, very limited budget of $15 million dollars, about the same as the pilot episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. released in the same year. But unlike the case of films like Guardians or SuperBob mentioned above, which were unable to compete financially with American superhero films, Krrish 3 was embraced by Indian audiences to the tune of around $45–50 million at the Indian box office in the same year as Iron Man 3 made only $11.1 million and Man of Steel $6 million in the same region. India is a rare market where, unlike Russia, the UK and most other countries, Hollywood films receive a minority share of the box office revenue of only around 10% per year (see Bhushan 2014).
Krrish 3 and Indian superhero films are certainly more melodramatic and light-hearted than their American counterparts. With their outlandish plots and extravagant dance numbers they eschew the veristic turn embraced by most American films of the genre and are not mired in trauma, even though India has had more than its own share of tragedies in the last few decades. But unlike the MCU superheroes, Krrish does experience the deaths of civilians first-hand; in one sequence he carries a dying, plague-infected girl in his arms as he runs through the contaminated streets of Mumbai, a city where people are shown to be hurt and even die onscreen, leading the hero to admit to his father: ‘I can hear their screams and I am helpless…’ David Chute at Variety wrote that Krrish 3 was not ‘an audience-pummeling industrial product like most of Hollywood’s superhero films. It has the off-hand, anything-is-possible spirit of a children’s book or fairy tale’ (2013), and his description of the film as a fairy tale is a relevant one not just for Indian superhero films, but those of the MCU which we have explored throughout the course of this book. Thomas Elsaesser has described the contemporary blockbuster film, of which the superhero genre is without a doubt the superlative example, as ‘the natural, that is, technologically more evolved, extension of fairy tales’ (2001: 17) and Stan Lee himself, the creator of many of the characters discussed in this book, saw the allure of the superhero narrative in similar terms: ‘One reason people like these superhero stories so much is just about everybody reads fairytales when they’re young. Well, when you become older, you don’t read fairytales anymore, but I think you never outgrow your love for stories of people who are bigger than life and can do things that normal people can’t do’ (2016a: 96). It is important to note that the adoption of the term ‘fairy tale’ by both Elssaesser and Lee here is not employed in the casual and pejorative sense it is used by many. We can choose to see fairy tales or their modern incarnations, the blockbuster, as stories only suitable for children, or we can see them as a richly-textured tapestry of cultural mythology and ask what they are able to reveal about the societies which form them and very often seem to need them. As Jack Zipes offered in his remarkable study of the form, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, ‘The fairytales we have come to revere as classical are not ageless, universal and beautiful in and of themselves, and they are not the best therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them’ (2006: 11). Similarly, superhero films are historical prescriptions formed by the ideologies of the times in which they are made and should be considered as resonant cultural artefacts rather than disregarded as ‘just a movie’. If the superhero genre revealed anything at all to new millennial audiences, it was that we in the real world need fictional superheroes just as much as the diegetic populations of the films they feature in.
Fig. 40: Moving into its second decade, the MCU released Black Panther (2018), ten years after Iron Man (2008)