Are Superhero films dying?

Snarf Zagyg said:

Four?

Oh, you said half the group.

Two?

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I suppose we should be grateful you didn't suggest Fo or Ur.

trappedslider said:

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I was actually talking to my wife about how many of his villains have doctorates of some stripe. I mean, the above even forgets Hugo Strange.

All fantastic four means to me is a movie I didn't care about a few years ago.

Ruin Explorer said:

Dr Doom is a 1960/1970s icon, and whilst he looks ridiculous, he oozes 1960s style and has a wild vibe and completely insane powers (he's a wizard, seriously). But whilst many nerds adore this, I think most audiences, seeing an "faithful" Dr Doom played straight are going to be pretty "LOL???!?". Hence the awful versions of Dr Doom that we got in both the recent movies, where they where they managed to just create Dooms guaranteed to annoy anyone who liked the actual Doom, but also not at all compelling, just generic supervillains.

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And here's where I disagree with you. They didn't do comic book Doom in the theatrical version because the producers didn't trust the audience. And that's been a problem with superhero adaptations for a while. But I think the successful introduction of characters like Dr. Strange, Asguardian "magic," and the Scarlet Witch demonstrate that audiences are just fine with it. In a lot of ways, it seems as though the producers of the Fantastic Four movie were embarrassed to be making a superhero movie.

In some ways the Fantastic Four's origin story works better today than it did in the 1960s. We've actually got private individuals funding their own littly forays into space. Just like Reed Richards!

Ruin Explorer said:

They might want to look primarily at voice actors (and/or normal actors who are good at voice work), honestly, and just get someone else to do the physical acting (I mean, it was good enough for Darth Vader, a very similar character in many ways), which will be CGI'd anyway because any practical version of that suit is going to be a disaster.

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Matt Mercer?

Who voiced Doom in the animated series? The one were they replaced the human torch with an annoying robot so kids didn't set themselves on fire?

Thomas Shey said:

I was actually talking to my wife about how many of his villains have doctorates of some stripe. I mean, the above even forgets Hugo Strange.

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And how Gotham City is one huge OSHA violation?

MGibster said:

And here's where I disagree with you. They didn't do comic book Doom in the theatrical version because the producers didn't trust the audience. And that's been a problem with superhero adaptations for a while. But I think the successful introduction of characters like Dr. Strange, Asguardian "magic," and the Scarlet Witch demonstrate that audiences are just fine with it. In a lot of ways, it seems as though the producers of the Fantastic Four movie were embarrassed to be making a superhero movie.

In some ways the Fantastic Four's origin story works better today than it did in the 1960s. We've actually got private individuals funding their own littly forays into space. Just like Reed Richards!

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I think there's a huge difference between trusting the audience or not, and feeling embarrassed by superheroes or not - both of which were huge issues in the 1990s and '00s, and making a smart start that gives the characters a better context and makes them work better than they would otherwise. I think you're actually re-enacting your own '00s trauma here, and mistaking doing the smart thing and really making the characters vibe with the way certain producers/directors did everything they could to not make superheroes superheroes.

With Doom I think the big issue is that if you update it so he's a recently emerged guy from a Central European country on Earth, which you'd kind of have to for the MCU, then his wild 1960s style just seems off, and Marvel will be tempted to change/update it (indeed, I 100% guarantee they will), not out of embarrassment but out of neophilia.

Likewise with the FF, I think if they did them all as modern people, they'd change them much more significantly, personality-wise and background-wise, than if they did them as 1960s people. Your point re: going into space is pretty irrelevant - as I was saying, the actual backstory of how they got their powers is both boring and irrelevant and should be covered as briefly as possible. Versions of the FF that have leaned into making it important have generally not been great (except I think some complicated comics iteration a while back, but that wouldn't fit with a movie).

There have been some suggestions (which I have no idea are anything but wishful thinking) that they might have had the FF go into space in the 60's and be trapped in some way for decades (maybe some version of the Negative Zone, maybe something else) and then come back during the modern period, so they can explain some of the attitudes and play a bit of the person-out-of-time riff too.

I mean it's not a bad idea...

MGibster said:

They didn't do comic book Doom in the theatrical version because the producers didn't trust the audience.

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And here's where I disagree with you. They didn't do comic book Doom in the theatrical version because comic book Doom is one of the things in comics books that is hard to do in a single short-ish story like one movie.

The main problem with Doom is that you need to establish that he isn't a garden-variety narcissist or megalomaniac. Doom is the man all those others want to be, but aren't. Establishing his particular brand of honor isn't an action sequence, after all.

The FF have another problem seen in comic book films - they are a team. When Marvel started doing Avengers movies, they took effort to establish several central characters as themselves in their own films before putting them together. The FF don't have that option - and establishing their own depth as individuals with the reduced screen-time of teamwork is no mean feat.