Way back in 2008, when the world was innocent and not yet a partisan hellhole, a little movie came out called Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr. It would begin the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and kickoff Phase One of world domination. At some point between then and now, with a new superhero movie every ten seconds, we’ve gotten fatigued. James Gunn knows this, and has a plan around it.
Gunn appeared on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum and touched on the idea of superhero fatigue and how he plans to combat it as the co-head of DC Studios.
“Do you you think there are too many superhero shows and movies?” Rosenbaum asked.
“Yes!” Gunn said. “Yes, I do think there’s too many.” Gunn said he’s aware of the issue and that “we’re not going to overextend ourselves at DC. We’re going to be very careful with the product we put out and making sure everything is as good as it could possibly be.”
So why have superhero movies gotten so ho-hum? “I think people have gotten really lazy with their superhero movies,” he said. “They’ve gotten to place where ‘oh, it’s a superhero let’s make a movie about it’ and ‘oh, let’s make a sequel ’cause the first one did really well.’”
The movies are coming out, he said, but it’s hard to care because the movies are just checking off boxes, and not developing the characters or using emotion to propel a story forward.
“They aren’t thinking ‘why is this story special? What makes this story stand apart from other stories? What is the story at the heart of it all, what makes this character important, what makes this story different that it fills a need for people in theaters to go see it?'”
This cookie-cutter approach to filmmaking is the reason people are sick of superhero stories, he said. “There’s a lot of biff pow bam stuff happening.”
The most important part of a movie is making sure you care about the characters and that doesn’t really seem to be happening a lot lately, he said. “And they’ve gotten too generic.” He blames a “middle-of-the-road” tone that all of them seem to have.
Gunn said he “likes different genres” when it comes to superhero films, and we don’t see enough of that lately. Whatever happens over at DC, you have to admit Gunn cares very much about getting these movies right. The future’s looking brighter and brighter at DC.