RONNIE SAENZ / ASST. OPINION EDITOR

Modern superheroes with capes, masks and tight spandex have been around since Superman debuted in 1938, but it feels like superheroes are more popular now than ever, making billions of dollars worth of blockbuster movies, merchandising, television shows and video games annually since the late 2000’s. 

Superhero media has become a juggernaut (no association with the Marvel character) in mainstream media over the past two decades, but I’m afraid it’s now becoming oversaturated and unoriginal. This is best illustrated by the massive financial losses Marvel and DC have taken this past year. In the period of two months Marvel had two flops: “The Marvels” and “Madame Web.” “The Marvels” was the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) lowest grossing film of all time, and “Madame Web,”which was produced by Sony in association with Marvel, grossed only $100 million against its $80 million budget. 

“Madame Web” is also widely regarded as one of the worst superhero movies of all time, earning a twelve percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. Not to mention DC studios’ underwhelming “The Flash” movie lost $200 million at the box office, which is a big bomb in the studio’s history. Marvel and DC are supposed to be the gold standard in superhero media, yet they have been flopping hard this year. It seems the only way out is to change which products are greenlit, or go bankrupt. 

The sheer amount of superhero media released in such a short period of time has become overwhelming for many viewers, including myself. Marvel Studios, which has been spearheading the superhero craze, released five movies, four TV shows and three video games in 2023 alone. They’re still going strong, as the studio has five new movies planned and a new “Wolverine” video game slated for this year. 

It’s exhausting, and the worst part is that we’re expected to consume all of this media to understand the greater overarching narrative. I am not spending 20 hours of my time watching the same superhero movie with a different coat of paint just so I can get the whole life story of Baddie McBadGuy and why he wants to conquer the multiverse or whatever. It seems like Marvel and the majority of the superhero industry has become more concerned with making as much content as possible over making stories worth telling. This is mostly due to the shift many companies are making to streaming services. The streaming service model requires a large influx of content to keep users subscribed longer, and that’s where superhero media comes in. Disney+ for example, has been releasing Marvel show after Marvel show for the past two years, releasing a new show nearly every two months.

I think the high output of movies would be acceptable, if the quality also kept up. This year, there were only two superhero movies and one show that I liked out of the dozens of releases this year. One of them was “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse” because of its ambitious cinematography and plot. It’s actually impressive that anything was good, given the short turnaround these films have.

You get a lot of the same movies, with the same messages and same tropes. You could probably take every superhero movie made in the past decade and only have four or five with an original plot or message. Many of them boil down to a fight of good versus evil, where the bad guy is an alien or foreigner that wants to change the world for the worse. It doesn’t help that this feeds into superheroes’ very U.S.-centric narrative, often having storylines that have not so subtle themes of U.S. nationalism. 

Sure, the superhero industry is still lucrative, and many will say that’s all that matters. The system works, and many people still buy superhero products. In fact the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time, earning a total of $11.9 billion in box office revenue, which is double the earnings of the runner up franchise: Star Wars.

The issue is that they can’t keep it up forever. Audiences will eventually get tired of superheroes and move on to something else. An example of this happening was the Young Adult (YA) Dystopia craze in the 2010’s. While not as popular as superheroes are today, audiences loved this genre, such as the critically acclaimed series “The Hunger Games.” Yet, the genre fell into obscurity because it didn’t evolve. The pinnacle of this mediocrity is the “Divergent” book series. It stripped down all of the elements of YA novels to its bare parts: teenage girl protagonist who didn’t fit in, the sexy/brooding love interest with a secret soft side, the sorting/division of society and some evil villains. It simply used these tropes because they were popular, but didn’t add anything to the story. 

“Divergent” wasn’t the only YA film that kept recycling the same tropes over and over again, and that’s what made audiences sick of the genre and stop watching. Yet, this is exactly what much of modern superhero media does. It simply follows the superhero formula and ships it without any regard for trying something new in the genre or giving their own unique message. While superhero media is still seeing profits, this is the future of superheroes too, if they don’t change.

The tropes and stories are what make superhero media so popular, but personally there are only a few pieces of superhero media I enjoy, because so many play out the same way. The Amazon Studios series “The Boys” challenges many of these tropes by depicting superheroes as egotistical celebrities. Even “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse” which came out in 2023, challenged the norms of digital animation and made one of the most spectacular looking films I’ve ever seen. 

Superheroes may not be going anywhere soon, especially with the numerous upcoming Marvel films, a new list of DCU movies and more recently season 2 of “Invincible” last March. I’m not optimistic, but I’m sure the industry will be making a profit in the upcoming years. Superhero media can be good, but the industry needs to put in the additional effort into making something we’ve never seen before.

The classic image of a muscular, cape-wearing superhero has had a good run, but it has also become a tired cliché. Photo courtesy of Esteban López/Unsplash