Seriously, how? They've been trying to kill of superheroes for years (Watchmen, the Boys) but nothing seems to stick.
Genres die when it becomes impossible to create original work within it but rather only metacommentary on the genre itself.
Take the Noir genre. You can write a neo-Noir (like Brick) or a self-conscious imitation (Chinatown, Mank) or a parody but what you cannot do is make a straight ahead Noir.
The Dresden Files definitely uses Noir tropes, but that's all they are, tropes.
A scathing work of satire that manages to get insanely popular and become a cultural phenomenon.
That was Don Quixote which killed chivalric romances, and that was Blazing Saddles which killed whitewashed TV Westerns.
It didn't so much kill James Bond as it forced James Bond to be reinvented, excising all of the camp elements and becoming more like Jason Bourne/Mission Impossible/etc.
Like superheroes, IMO zombies aren't a genre, they're an element — they exist within a genre (often action, horror, or thriller especially) but aren't one unto themselves.
I think the Walking Dead having a good first season or two that a lot of people watched and then quickly becoming unwatchable garbage wore people out on them.
Oh that's a great idea, I think there's a lot of untapped horror that's left to be explored in super hero stuff, the implications of a lot of powers have a lot of pure horror potential
The most recent Fantastic 4 was apparently originally intended to lean into that, with some body horror shit when they got their powers and stuff, but the studios apparently removed the vast majority of it
superhero horror movies
This is really hard because horror thrives on being very low-budget and superhero films are generally expensive. So you get half-assed PG13 horror to try to get crossover appeal and it flops and no one tries again for a while.
Idk about that, plenty of zombie things came out afterwords, I am Legend, World War Z, and The Walking Dead just off the top of my head
And they all sucked and nobody gave a shit about them.
Even TWD, at its best was like "can this, MAYBE revive the zombie genre?!?!?"
A genre isn't "dead" because it isn't made anymore. They'll release a dozen capeshit movies before they realize its dead. A genre dies with the last release that has something to say.
I think the reason the superhero movies aren't dying is that they're actually other genres with superheroes as the characters. Per Wikipedia here are some examples: horror (Blade), thriller (Unbreakable), period drama (Captain America: The First Avenger), space opera (Guardians of the Galaxy), family film (The Incredibles), teen film (Spider-Man: Homecoming), heist film (Ant-Man), fantasy (Doctor Strange), neo-noir (The Dark Knight), political drama (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), and Western (Logan)
The Boys has a political point, they are corporate mercenaries with license to kill granted by the US govt
a genre does not die when it has been well satirized or thoroughly deconstructed
a genre dies when those who control the medium believe that genre will not make enough money anymore
Well yeah. I don't think anyone here thinks the satire itself is what kills a genre. When a work of satire becomes a cultural phenomenon and no one can take the genre seriously anymore, it stops being profitable.
Option 1: Superhero movies killed traditional action movies. Seriously, think about how many action movies have come out in the last decade +? I mean before capeshit in any given year there were multiple big budget action films. Now... there's hardly any. So maybe we just need to find something else that slots into that "action" genre that can crowd out superheroes?
Option 2: It is a possiblity - maybe remote - that movie theaters never recover from COVID. It may be that people don't go to the theater anymore or at least only at a fraction of the rate they used to. That would absolutely destroy movie budgets and the superhero movie experience just doesn't translate to a TV screen.
action films in general don't; they're all spectacle, and the TV screen demands a narrative, whether you have spectacle or no.
I think the Good, the Bad and the Ugly killed westerns. Afterwards there was just no reason to watch a western when you could be watching the good the bad and the ugly instead.
Stop trying to make superhero "modern mythology" holy shit
Why does everyone on this site get so god damned pissed about inane shit
Extremely online people who happen to follow an ideology that has historically produced very opinionated people.
I won most opinionated in highschool I feel very seen by this comment
Hating popular stuff seems to be part of the online leftist "thing". Everyone reminding themselves how cool they are I guess.
They're often very allegorical and full of symbolism, fights and struggles are never just for the sake of itself, but rather carries some greater meaning. That's why there's so many stories involving trickery, cleverness, or random divine retribution.
Equating them heavily commercialized pop culture that objectively are produced for mass consumption in mind feel tasteless in my opinion.
I hate this "argument". What "superhero movie" means today is like 2 or 3 canons owned by Marvel and DC. It's not modern mythology and the recent superhero madness is only around 10-15 years old.
Modern superhero stuff has its roots in 1940s comic books. There is a big difference between ancient mythology and modern superhero movies, which is that no one controlled ancient mythology. People were making shit up and circulating stories. A part of it was rooted in religion too. Superhero movies today are Marvel and DC. If you're trying to figure out why these movies are appealing, you could say it is because people like adventures where the good guys beat up the bad guys, but that describes every movie ever basically. But the superhero craze is a specific phenomenon that didn't exist 20 years ago and probably won't exist 20 years from now.
Mentioning that movie creates a 75% chance that I will watch it again
The hotel orgy scene is a masterpiece of bait-and-switch humor. All those carefully planned shots so you never see anyone's junk and then bam, 2 full seconds of full on cock and balls right at the end. I was laughing so hard I started coughing and had to pause the movie.
"The Beatles! Please stop fighting in India!"
When they stop making a profit. People have been saying there’s gonna be superhero fatigue for like a decade now but they still bring in the most money for studios.
Definitely not a decade. A decade ago it had barely even started. It needs more time to run its course.
Well, in some cases, parody movies like Austin Powers for the old James Bond movies, and Airplane! for disaster movies.
Don't forget Blazing Saddles for the western genre
Don Quixote and Zorro. This was solved. Sergio Leone did a pretty sweet job with Once Upon a Time in the West for westerns and spaghetti westerns that he helmed the popularity of as well as Once Upon a Time in America did with gangster movies. Austin Powers changed James Bond. Tim Burton"s Batman was a reaction to Adam West's. The ones the kill or change a genre isn't really about the movie but the conditions surrounding it, otherwise no one watched it.
exist outside the cultural/collective acceptance of the currently existing hegemony without being properly subsumed by it or "allowed" to exist in its graces
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they killed disco because black and queer people had the gal to make it during the 70s and 80s
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there is nothing threatening to the status quo about the superhero genre or storytelling element in most mainstream comics/sequential art storytelling in general for idk how long. you can probably solve, subvert, etc. a genre but the nature of infinite content in the 21st century means that it's nearly impossible for something to become truly "dead" in the same way that contemporary literature killed prior storytelling conventions or tv killed radio etc. etc. etc.
at least for now with our current technology but i'm not holding my breath on VR or any of that shit miraculously changing the power of narrative storytelling or changing genre conventions
this is all coming from someone who professes constantly how much they hate capeshit but still will sneak-read a marvel or dc comic every once in a while (yes i am secretly still binge reading the current hickman x-men among other things run don't tell anyone)
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