Due to the fact that superheroes have been perpetually subject to revisionism, they become symptomatic signifiers of contemporary consciousness and thus can serve as embodiments of specific needs in a given time.
– Johannes Schlegel and Frank Habermann (2011: 33–4)
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol…as a symbol I can be incorruptible…I can be everlasting…
– Bruce Wayne, Batman Begins (2005)
We are living in the age of the superhero and we cannot deny it. The subject of this book, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is the most financially successful film series ever produced, with earnings of more $12 billion at the international box office since 2008, comfortably surpassing rivals like the James Bond (1962–) and Star Wars (1977–) franchises, even though they have both existed for decades longer.1 The image of the superhero is now one of the most pervasive in contemporary global popular culture: whether we like it or not, it is they that serve as examples for our children, who play with their likenesses and aspire to be them, it is their imposing personages we use as a barometer to measure our real-world figures and even ourselves by, and it is films about them which fill multiplexes all over the world, topping the box office from Argentina to Zimbabwe. It does not matter whether we call this phenomenon a ‘resurgence’ (Chermak et al. 2003: 11) or a ‘renaissance’ (Greene and Roddy 2015: 2) or describe their return as leading to a superhero decade (see Gray and Kaklamanidou 2011: 1) or a ‘cultural catastrophe’, as renowned graphic novelist Alan Moore suggested (qtd. in Flood 2014) – it is here.
Since around the year 2000 there have been hundreds of superhero films and television shows produced all around the globe, but it is undoubtedly their American incarnation that has emerged as the most prominent, the most successful and the most influential example of the form. Selecting almost any summer at random in the last ten years allows us to see the substantial impact the genre has had on the marketplace: 2008, the date of the first MCU films, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, also saw the release of The Dark Knight, Hancock, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Punisher: War Zone and Wanted, to name just a few. Three of them, The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Hancock, were in the top ten grossing films of the year. Eight years later in 2016 the genre showed no sign of losing its popularity, despite many predicting that market saturation would have an impact on its appeal (see McMillan 2014; Khatchatourian 2015), and four of the highest grossing films worldwide were from the superhero genre: Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, with Doctor Strange and X-Men: Apocalypse appearing just outside the top ten. The combined international gross of just these six American superhero films alone totalled almost $5 billion dollars.2
It was certainly not always like this. While superheroes have been on the cultural landscape since Superman (who made his debut in June 1938), Batman (May 1939) and Captain America (March 1941) first graced the pages of their respective comic books, and had periodically reached the television and cinema screens in the subsequent decades, the three Salkind-era Superman films (1978– 1983) and the Burton/Schumacher-era incarnation of Batman (1989–1992; 1995–1997), culturally and commercially impactful on their release though they were, did not inspire the veritable wave of additions to the genre the likes of which we are currently experiencing. Throughout the 1980s until the phenomenal success of Batman (1989) only one other superhero film made it into the top ten US domestic box office, Superman II (1981), and in the whole of the 1990s a superhero film only appeared in the top ten three times and never in the top five: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Batman Returns (1992) and Batman Forever (1995). Yet the first decades of the new millennium have seen a proliferation of superhero films and television shows like never before.
Why then has the superhero genre, which, it should be noted, is one of the only truly American film genres, alongside the gangster film and the western, re-emerged so emphatically in recent years? The answer to this question is a complicated one which requires an interrogation of technological, industrial, economic and ideological perspectives. In short, as the title to this prologue suggests, the superhero film returned because it was needed. It was needed by the American film industry, which saw declining ticket sales throughout this period in spite of record-breaking grosses and it seemed to be needed by audiences who turned to superheroes in two of the most turbulent decades in living memory (see Cowden 2015). Might Brian Kaller have been right then when he asserted in his article entitled ‘Why We Need Superheroes’ (2016) that ‘In troubled times, Americans turn to the heroic ideal’? Joss Whedon, the director of The Avengers (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), which each made more than a billion dollars at the box office, was only joking when he stated in his director’s commentary accompanying the Blu-ray release of The Avengers, that ‘We saved movies’, but his remark does have an element of truth to it. In an age where people have stopped going to the cinema as frequently as they used to, they returned to it in droves for the superhero film. There is a straightforward reason for this financial success, but it is one which does not entirely explain why the genre re-emerged and has been unequivocally embraced by audiences in recent years.
Simply put, recent additions to the superhero genre have been able to transcend en masse the demographic audience usually associated with films of this type. So, although it is convenient to say, as many do, that it is an infantile genre which only appeals to children and teenagers, as David Cronenberg did, stating that it is ‘adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying, you know, [The] Dark Knight Rises [2012] is supreme cinema art, I don’t think they know what the fuck they’re talking about’ (qtd. in Zakarin 2012b) or Susan Faludi who, in her indispensable volume The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in the Post-9/11 Era, argued that the superhero only appeals to ‘someone, typically a prepubescent teenage boy, who feels weak in the world and insufficient to the demands of the day and who needs a Walter Mitty bellows to pump up his self-worth’ (2007: 51), significant evidence points to the contrary. A film like The Avengers does not make $623 million at the US box office, plus $896 million at the global box office, then a quarter of a billion on DVD and Blu-ray sales in the US alone by selling tickets only to juveniles. In fact, as Nikki Finke (2012) at Deadline reported, the demographic for Joss Whedon’s film was extremely diverse, with its audience divided exactly in half: fifty percent under twenty-five years old and fifty percent over. It skewed towards males, as one might expect, with sixty percent of its audience being male, but forty percent of those who bought tickets were female. Chief of Distribution at Disney, Dave Hollis, was quite right to say, ‘We were clearly an option for everyone’ (qtd. in Stewart 2012). Disney executives had every reason to be ecstatic at the box office success of The Avengers having purchased Marvel Entertainment just three years before in 2009 for $4 billion dollars. Like their equally high-profile acquisitions of Pixar ($7.4 billion; 2006) and Lucasfilm ($4 billion; 2012), these transactions consolidated Disney’s position as the world’s leading entertainment brand and in 2016 the MCU films were central in enabling Disney to break the $7 billion global box office record, which had never been achieved by a single studio before (see Sweney 2016).
If the levels of revenue stopped there for a film like The Avengers the statistics would be remarkable enough, but the figures mentioned above do not take into account global digital rentals and purchases, television rights and, even more importantly, subsidiary revenue streams like video games, comic books and other merchandising products connected to the film and its characters, about whom Jan Füchtjohann wrote, ‘with their iconic costumes [they] function exactly like Coca-Cola – as easily identifiable, sold everywhere and hence valuable brands’ (2011). The business of movie-making in the last twenty years has transformed from a state in which the film itself functioned as the primary revenue-generating product in the industry to it being just one part of an extensive multi-media tapestry, the metaphorical steel ball in the pinball machine that Thomas Elsaesser described in his article, ‘The Blockbuster: Everything Connects, But Not Everything Goes’; writing in 2001 Elsaesser could not have anticipated the MCU, but he did see how the American film industry had begun to be increasingly defined by the interconnection of diverse markets to an extent it had never been before:
The principle behind it would be something like this: you launch with great force the little steel ball, shoot it to the top, and then you watch it bounce off the different contacts, pass through the different gates, and whenever it touches a contact, your winning figures go up. The media entertainment business is such a pinball machine: the challenge is to ‘own’ not only the steel ball but also as many of the contacts as possible because the same ‘ball’ gets you ever higher scores, that is, profits. The contact points are the cinema screens and video stores, theme parks and toy shops, restaurant chains and video arcades, bookstores and CD record shops. (2001: 18)
The result of this is, in financial terms concerning the Marvel Cinematic Universe alone, a multi-billion-dollar industry which sometimes earns in the region of $2 billion per year at the box office, but also billions more in merchandising on top of that (see Graser 2015), because, unlike what David Cronenberg and Susan Faludi would have us believe, in actual fact, the appeal of the superhero ‘transcends age, gender and ethnicity’ (Robin Korman, qtd. in Palmeri 2012).
There are other more technological and industrial reasons for the rise of the superhero film to prominence as the genre came to both embody and define a range of contemporary film production, distribution and exhibition practices. The genre has ridden the crest of a wave of technological developments, both benefitted from and driven advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI), a symbiotic relationship Yvonne Tasker described as one in which ‘the reinvigoration of superhero action depends on and has in turn facilitated significant advances in digital imagery’ (2015: 181). So while in 1978 Richard Donner’s Superman was advertised with the tagline ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ and the film was at the vanguard of special effects for its time, advances in CGI now allow filmmakers, for the first time ever, to put superheroes onscreen the way they were originally envisioned in their comic books: whether it is the dynamically realised exotic environments of Asgard (Thor), Wakanda (Black Panther) and Sakaar (Thor: Ragnarok), spectacular battles in cities (real and imagined) like New York (The Avengers), Xandar (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Sokovia (Avengers: Age of Ultron), the creation of entirely computer-generated characters with supramimetic precision that are able to seamlessly interact with the physical presence of live actors on set, as in the cases of the Hulk, Ultron, Rocket and Groot (full grown, baby and teen), or where CGI is now able to replace characters without the audience even being aware of it to have them accomplish physically impossible action sequences like those performed by Stephen Strange and Karl Mordo in Doctor Strange, or Spider-Man and Iron Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming. CGI is now also used to convincingly de-age performers, enabling actors to play themselves in flashbacks to the past, something which allowed the then fifty-year-old Robert Downey Jr. to portray his twenty-something self in Captain America: Civil War, the sixty-five-year-old Kurt Russell to play himself at the turn of his thirties, around the time of his iconic roles in Escape From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982), in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, or the seventy-something Michael Douglas to play the character of Hank Pym in 1989 in Ant-Man, recreating exactly how he looked two years after Wall Street (1987) and Fatal Attraction (1987). Douglas joked about this technology being able to give him the opportunity to star not in a sequel to Romancing the Stone (1984) and Jewel of the Nile (1985), but a prequel, and it is perhaps reasonable to speculate that this will become more common in the future given the high-profile use of CGI to bring deceased performers back to life in films like Furious 7 (2015) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) (see Stolworthy 2015). These practices have defined the tendency of modern blockbusters to prioritise image, action and spectacle over narrative which has been described by some as a return to the ‘cinema of attractions’, Tom Gunning’s categorisation of trends in the early decades of cinema history to directly solicit ‘spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event’ (1990: 58), a description which, without a doubt, could just as well be applied to the contemporary blockbuster.3
The global market for these American films has also changed in ways which have benefitted the proliferation of the superhero genre and others which primarily rely on spectacle. The sequel paradigm which defined Hollywood film production from the 1980s to the early 2000s is now seen as progressively outdated for larger brands in an age where the ‘universe’ model is considered a more compatible long-term business strategy. One could argue that this idea of a shared universe in which separate films exist in the same diegetic world can be seen as early as the original Universal monster cycle (1931–48), but in the wake of the success of the MCU many studios began to experiment with the form: like the expansion of the cinematic Star Wars universe from the main series, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), to include the so called ‘Anthology Series’ titles set in the same world like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), and Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ franchise that began with The Mummy (2017) and was planned to be the start of an intertwined six-film series before disastrous reviews and disappointing box office figures for the first instalment threw the whole project into disarray. This process has even necessitated the emergence of new terminology to delineate its intricacies: an evolution from simple terms like remake, sequel and prequel, to the more complicated lexicon of reboot, re-imagining, sidequel, midquel, interquel and stealth sequel (see Jolin 2012).4 These complexities led Peter Vignold in his Das Marvel Cinematic Universe Anatomie einer Hyperserie to argue that the MCU
can no longer be fully understood as a linear film series, rather it forms a hierarchical structure of encircling hyperseries and series within series that are interconnected. The result is a potentially endless franchise that so far has successfully escaped the almost inevitable narrative exhaustion encountered by almost every other linear series, and with it has established itself in a comparatively short time as an economically dominant model. (2017: 10)
A large amount of this increasing revenue is due to the expanding influence of global markets which have grown exponentially since 2008, the largest and most important being China, but the list of countries impacting on growing box office receipts for American films is diverse: from India to Venezuela, Nigeria to Peru, five countries which were described in Variety in 2016 by Eric Schwartzel as ‘the five fastest-growing markets’ in the world. Only $15 million of Iron Man’s gross came from China, but by the time of Iron Man 3 this had increased to $121 million. This extraordinary success was certainly not a one off; The Avengers made $86.3 million of its $1.5 billion there and Avengers: Age of Ultron would go on to make $240 million of its $1.4 billion in China also. However, even these huge numbers were overshadowed by the success of The Fate of the Furious (2017), the eighth film in the Fast and Furious franchise (2001–), which made nearly $400 million in China, almost twice as much as it earned in the United States. These figures clearly indicate the growing importance of the Chinese market for American films which has resulted in a range of Chinese-American co-productions like The Great Wall (2016) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), films having scenes specifically shot in China (see Transformers: Age of Extinction [2014] and Iron Man 3), or having their narratives altered to appeal to Chinese audiences (see World War Z [2014]).5
So, the American film industry might have needed and even came to be defined by the superhero film in this era, but what might it have been about these films in particular which led them to resonate so powerfully with audiences, not just in the United States, but all over the world? Might their principal appeal be the escapist, wish-fulfilment fantasies of their narratives? Could American audiences (and those around the globe) have been seeking solace from the tempestuous realities of their day-to-day lives in the decades impacted upon by the ‘War on Terror’ and the global financial crisis? Or might it be the case, as Peter Coogan argues in Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, that ‘Superheroes are the closest our modern culture has to myths’? (2006: 124) Undoubtedly, it is possible to discern a great deal about a society from its heroic mythology, those exemplary figures it selects to be a manifestation of its highest values. While the ancient Greeks had tales of Hercules, Achilles and Odysseus, and late-nineteenth century America turned to mythologised portraits of Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett and Jesse James, through the mid-twentieth century and into twenty-first, contemporary Western culture found its heroic ideals embodied in superheroes like Superman, Batman and Captain America. Danny Fingeroth, in Superman on the Couch, goes back even further to seek antecedents for these characters who have always endorsed prevailing cultural values, to the likes of the Ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (writings on whom were found on Babylonian stone tablets dated as early as 18th century BC) and Biblical heroes like Samson and David, which he calls the ‘precursors of superheroes’ (2004: 16). Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, envisioned his most famous character as a modern-day demi-god, stating ‘I conceived a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I have ever heard of rolled into one’ (qtd. in Reynolds 1992: 9). Thus, the original incarnations of Superman and Captain America, as Chris Rojek suggested, ‘present idealized representations of American heroism and the defence of justice’ (2001: 25) on the eve of America’s entry into World War Two, and characters like the Fantastic Four (November 1961), the Incredible Hulk (May 1962), Iron Man (March 1963), Spider-Man (August 1963) and the X-Men (September 1963) were, according to Matthew Costello, ‘born under the mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war that was a cornerstone of the four-decade bipolar division of the world between the United States and the USSR’ (2009: 1). The narratives of the new millennial American superheroes explored in this monograph similarly provide a cultural battleground on which a war of representation is waged. Their backdrop, one which forms them, nourishes and sustains them, is the post-9/11 period, as the discourse of what became referred to as the ‘War on Terror’ era emerged quite clearly, and not coincidentally, as the dominant themes of the revivified superhero genre. American superhero films very rarely explicitly mention the events of 11 September 2001 and the ‘War on Terror’, but they self-consciously evoke them almost obsessively, both as thematic motifs and also visually in their detailed recreations of its mise-en-scène. The ‘War in Terror’ and 9/11 are embedded within the frames of films like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (2005–2012), the X-Men series (1999–), the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) (2013–) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where they are restaged and refought in allegory by very American heroes like Batman, Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, Superman and Wonder Woman, projected through the prism of the superhero genre in reassuringly palliative narratives which John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett have called a ‘mythic massage’ (1977: xiii) and Charmaine Fernandez refers to as ‘therapeutic intervention’ (2013: 1).
Fig. 1: The heroes we need right now? The superhero as an articulation of contemporary mythology in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
In this way, one should regard the superhero film as the descendent of that other truly American genre, the western, which, for a number of decades, was one of the most popular genres during the Classical Hollywood era. It has largely retreated from our cinema and television screens today, with some notable exceptions; nevertheless the western and its evocative frontier mythology still remain a culturally resonant motif in debates about American ideology and identity. The genre’s themes and that which they portray as normative behaviour are not too far removed from those promulgated by the superhero film: in both, ‘real men’ are those who are strong, self-reliant, courageous and resolute, simplistically drawn bad guys are there to be vanquished, women are to be saved and adored, the law is inherently unreliable, and the only answer to a problem, regardless of what it might be, is righteous and redemptive violence. Just as importantly, both genres are primarily about the experiences of the same group, as what Jane Tompkins wrote of the western is equally true of the superhero film, that its lead characters are primarily ‘male, and almost all of the other characters are men’ (1992: 38).
Part of the former appeal of the western and the current popularity of the superhero film is undoubtedly their malleability. They are able to mould themselves into a variety of sub-genres and moods, and they both, as Barry Keith Grant observed, take ‘social debates and tensions and cast them into formulaic narratives, condensing them into dramatic conflicts between individual characters, heroes and villains, providing familiar stories that help us “narrativize” and so make sense of the large abstract forces that effect our lives’ (2012: 4). In its long history, the western has been able to subsume diverse variations into its central narrative and visual parameters: from gritty and realistic tales, to comedic and even musical variations of the genre, both in film and on television. In the same way, superhero texts of the new millennium have also had a considerable range: from light-hearted and fantastical (Fantastic Four [2005] and Sky High [2005]), more grounded and quasi-realistic (Special [2006] and Defendor [2009]), quirky and offbeat (Hellboy [2004] and Deadpool [2016]), period-set (Wonder Woman [2017] and Captain America: The First Avenger [2010]), adult-oriented (Watchmen [2009] and Logan [2017]), animated (The Incredibles [2004] and The LEGO Batman Movie [2017]) to parodic and comedic (Kick Ass [2010] and The Green Hornet [2010]), even an entry into the Found Footage cycle (Chronicle [2012]).
After 9/11, several commentators used the western as shorthand for assertions about what American brands of justice might resemble in response. Dianne Amrie Amann wrote that President George W. Bush had ‘swaggered onto the foreign-policy scene like a latter-day Matt Dillon [from the TV series Gunsmoke, CBS, 1955–75] aiming to shoot down the supposed menace of international entanglement’ (qtd. in Lawrence and Jewett 2003: 12). Bush seemed to embrace this idea about himself and even channelled the iconic figures of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood with his repeated evocations of the Old West: only one week after 9/11 he demanded that Osama Bin Laden be taken ‘dead or alive’ (see Harnden 2001) and he also said that the best way to find terrorists was to ‘smoke them out’ (qtd. in Knowlton 2001). In 2002 he suggested that, ‘Contrary to my image as a Texan with two guns at my side, I’m more comfortable with a posse’ (qtd. in Bumiller). However, it was the superhero that many seemed to turn to more and more frequently as a frame of reference as the decade progressed. Peggy Noonan wrote that after seeing Bush at Ground Zero in New York she expected him to ‘tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest’ (2003) and some of Bush’s rhetoric did seem reminiscent of the genre: his quest to ‘rid the world of the evil-doers [in] a monumental struggle of good versus evil’ (2002) or a pledge to ‘wage a war to save civilization itself’ with a cause that is ‘just and victory is ultimately assured’ (2001e). President Obama was frequently envisioned as a superhero during his election campaign (see Gopolam 2008), but almost as often as a supervillain by his political opponents, including, most memorably, the image of him as Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, by Firas Alkhateeb (see Borrelli 2009). In similar ways, the larger than life figure of Donald Trump became a malleable icon for those on both sides of the political spectrum and his election victory in 2016 was even directly blamed, by more than one person, on the superhero film itself (see Hagley 2016; Melamid 2017). In an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, 2003–) broadcast on 19 May 2017, host Bill Maher stated that Hollywood’s obsession with superhero films was responsible for the rise in popularity of Trump in language more colourful than that used by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The American Monomyth (1977), but expressing very similar sentiments:
If you’re asking, what’s the problem? The problem is that superhero movies imprint this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny, and the best we can do is sit back and wait for Star-Lord and a fucking raccoon to sweep in and save our sorry asses…. Forget hard work, government institutions, diplomacy, investment. We just need a hero to rise, and so we put out the Bat Signal for one man who could step in and solve all of our problems very quickly. And that’s how we got our latest superhero: Orange Sphincter.
This monograph maintains that the superhero has largely replaced the western hero in the cultural imaginary and performs a very similar cultural function as it once did. Instead of being raised on western serials screened almost perpetually on television and playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the backyard, today’s generations are raised on superhero narratives, and children now play with (and as) Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Captain America and Spider-Man.6 Despite the retreat of the western genre from the forefront of popular culture, its mythology and the frontier narrative remains a vital part of the American experience, as Geoff King commented: ‘The traditional generic western may be in a state of near terminal decline, but many aspects of the mythic or ideological narrative that animated it remain alive and well in Hollywood’ (2000: 2). The western has become subsumed into the superhero genre and can be seen quite clearly in many of its films, whether explicitly in Logan, which draws extensively and artfully from Shane (1953) and Unforgiven (1992), or implicitly in films like Iron Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the rest of the MCU. 7
Fig. 2: The superhero film as the descendent of the western. Here in Logan (2017), one of its most explicit articulations, an aging Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) holds up an X-Men comic book while Shane (1953) plays in the background
This idea of what might have been needed by American culture in the post-9/11 era is particularly relevant for the superhero film above all genres as it emerges as one of its central motifs to an extent it had never been before. In Spider-Man (2002), one of the first films in this superhero renaissance and a film very much marked by 9/11 in terms of its themes and iconography, but one which never mentions the event by name, thereby establishing a paradigm that will be followed, for the most part, by superhero films throughout the decade, Peter Parker’s Aunt May suggests: ‘We need a hero, courageous, sacrificing people, setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero, people line up for ‘em, cheer for them, scream their names.’ Raimi’s film provided audiences with the single most influential line of dialogue in the genre in the two decades after, one which has been linked by many not just to fictional superheroes, but to America as a whole: ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ (see Peltonen 2013). In Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) Lois Lane wins a Pulitzer Prize for her article, ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’ and she later asks the iconic hero, ‘How could you leave us like that? I moved on. So did the rest of us. That’s why I wrote it. The world doesn’t need a saviour. And neither do I…’ In The Avengers, after more than sixty years frozen in the ice, a newly revived Captain America is reluctant to put on his old red, white and blue uniform as he has seen how much the world has changed since 1945. He asks Agent Coulson, ‘Aren’t the Stars and Stripes a little old-fashioned?’, to which Coulson responds, ‘With everything that is happening and things coming to light people just might need a little old-fashioned’. It is Christopher Nolan’s genre-redefining Batman trilogy which offers the most sustained meditation on this theme. In Batman Begins Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne, ‘Maybe someday, when Gotham no longer needs Batman, I’ll see him [Bruce Wayne] again’; and in the sequel, The Dark Knight, the Joker lectures Batman about the capricious nature of the residents of Gotham City by telling him, ‘They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper!’ But it is from Lieutenant James Gordon that the title of this prologue is derived, as at the climax of The Dark Knight Batman accepts being framed for the murder of Harvey Dent in order to allow the residents of Gotham City to continue believing in Dent’s integrity, even though it is a lie. Gordon suggests it is the appropriate course of action ‘because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now’. It is my contention that the return of the superhero in the first decades of the new millennium can be explained, to a significant extent, by the fact that it was the superhero that the United States needed in the fractious post-9/11 period. Outside the frames of the screen in the aftermath of 9/11, Jack Valenti, the then Head of Motion Picture Association of America, certainly felt that America needed the movies then more than ever before. He stated, ‘Here in Hollywood we must continue making our movies and our TV programmes…. The country needs what we create’ (2001; emphasis added). An interrogation of what the Marvel Cinematic Universe offered audiences in this era and what they might have to say about the times in which they were made is the subject of this monograph.
Notes
1 The MCU has also earned considerably more than other franchises which began in the first decade of the twenty-first century like the Harry Potter series (2001–), The Fast and Furious series (2001–), The Lord of the Rings (2001–2014) and the Transformers (2007–) series.
2 In fact, 2017 was one of the biggest years for the superhero genre with Wonder Woman, Logan, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, The LEGO Batman Movie, Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League topping the box office all over the world on their release.
3 Despite the seemingly contemporary nature of these assertions, they have been around for decades. As early as 1986 Tom Gunning wrote, ‘Clearly in some sense recent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’ (1990: 70). See also Wanda Strauven’s The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006).
4 A sidequel is a sequel that takes place at the same time as a previous film i.e. The Bourne Legacy (2012); a midquel or an interquel is a sequel which is set during a gap in a previously completed film series i.e. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; and a stealth sequel is a film which is not marketed as a sequel but is revealed to be one during the course of its narrative, as in Split (2017). The universe model can be very lucrative, but can also collapse after one poorly received film, as ambitious plans for franchises to follow Ghostbusters (2016) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) disappeared.
5 This marked growth in earnings around the globe can be tracked in country after country. In Venezuela and India, two of the markets mentioned in Schwartzel’s article (2016), Iron Man made $1.9 million and $2 million respectively; just a few years later Iron Man 3 made $12.4 million and $12.2 million in the same locations.
6 Intriguingly, this transition is commented on directly in Spider-Man: Homecoming by Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) who goes on to become the charismatic villain the Vulture. In the film’s prologue, set in the aftermath of the Battle of New York that was the climax of The Avengers, the Toomes Salvage Company are shown to be contracted to clean up the city. When he sees a picture of the Avengers drawn by a child he remarks: ‘Things are never gonna be the same now…. You got aliens, you got big green guys tearing down buildings. When I was a kid I used to draw cowboys and indians.’
7 The director of Logan, James Mangold, introduced a special screening of Shane at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater on 7 October 2013, with the following comment, ‘The best western films (and this is an example of the very best) are not centered on nostalgia, are not historical in nature (the moment in history when these films took place is largely a manufacture of imagination). The best of these films create a landscape that has evolved into an American mythology, one as resonant and evocative as religious parables, Japanese Samurai tales and the Greek Gods of Olympus’ (qtd. in Coleman 2017).