Steven Spielberg says that the superhero genre is 'finite' · 4:59pm Sep 10th, 2015
Steven Spielberg was recently asked what he felt would happen to the superhero genre, and he had this to say:
“We were around when the Western died, and there will be a time when the superhero movie goes the way of the Western. It doesn’t mean there won’t be another occasion where the Western comes back and the superhero movie someday returns. Of course, right now the superhero movie is alive and thriving. I’m only saying that these cycles have a finite time in popular culture. There will come a day when the mythological stories are supplanted by some other genre that possibly some young filmmaker is just thinking about discovering for all of us.”
Now, before you all go start screaming about him, think about it. Any and all film genres have these patterns and cicles to them. For instance, back in the first half of the 1970s, disaster movies like The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) were all the rage, making tons and tons of money, and in the case of The Towering Inferno, managing to score a Best Picture nomination (for those of you who keep track, it lost to The Godfather Part II). Eventually, the genre fizzled out, as a series of box office bombs made studio execs refrain from making them. However, it never died completely, instead just going dormant, before awakening again in the late 90s and early 2000s with films like Independence Day (1996), Dante's Peak (1998), Volcano (1997), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Armageddon (1999) and Deep Impact (1998). After The Day After Tomorrow however, the genre fizzled again, and so far has only had 2012 (2010) and San Andres (2015) to it's name as major entries (not counting the Asylum's endless river of direct to Netflix offerings).
Another genre that's had a huge fad only to fade and then come back in a different (yet similar) way is the what I like to call 'Smart Alec Teen Movie' movie genre. You know the type: John Hughes' The Breakfast Club (1985), Sixteen Candles (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Weird Science (1985), with Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1990) (which overlaps with stoner films) rounding it off. All of those were the biggest deal in the 80s, even getting the deconstruction treatment in 1990's Heathers. That genre eventually died off, thankfully, the snide self righteous aura getting old rather quickly (most likely because all of those disgruntled teens grew into actual adults and realized how empty their issues seemed when faced with the trials of adulthood). However, the genre has come back, albeit in a different, less confrontational and more 'philosophical' (read: pretentious) form with films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), The Fault in Our Stars (2014), Boyhood (2014) and Paper Towns (2015). Where's in the 80s the teens were all disgruntled, here, they become faux philosophers who spend their time crying to their diaries about how life is all so temporal and unfair and all that pretentious jazz. Heck, even the post-apocalyptic genre has fallen victum to the teen onslaught, with stuff like The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner all coming out and featuring almost identical tropes, just with a different gimmick to sell each one (gladiator's for Hunger Games, class division for Divergent, and free running for The Maze Runner).
Point I'm trying to make is that while Spielberg raises a valid point about how the genre is bound to reach it's peak and then eventually fade, that doesn't mean the genre is completely doomed. Quentin Tarantino also spoke about the Western Genre in a recent interview about his upcoming film The Hateful Eight, and he had this to say about the genre:
One thing that’s always been true is that there’s no real film genre that better reflects the values and the problems of a given decade than the Westerns made during that specific decade. The Westerns of the ’50s reflected Eisenhower America better than any other films of the day. The Westerns of the ’30s reflected the ’30s ideal. And actually, the Westerns of the ’40s did, too, because there was a whole strain of almost noirish Westerns that, all of a sudden, had dark themes. The ’70s Westerns were pretty much anti-myth Westerns — Watergate Westerns. Everything was about the anti-heroes, everything had a hippie mentality or a nihilistic mentality. Movies came out about Jesse James and the Minnesota raid, where Jesse James is a homicidal maniac. In Dirty Little Billy, Billy the Kid is portrayed as a cute little punk killer. Wyatt Earp is shown for who he is in the movie Doc, by Frank Perry. In the ’70s, it was about ripping the scabs off and showing who these people really were. Consequently, the big Western that came out in the ’80s was Silverado, which was trying to be rah-rah again — that was very much a Reagan Western.
As Tarantino points out, the Western didn't exactly die, but rather undergo cultural makeovers every few years to reflect the changing cultural mentality. This continued with the deconstruction Westerns like Unforgiven (1992), the sprawling epic Dances with Wolves (1990), and films that modernized the Western such as No Country for Old Men (2007), films that used the Western environment as a metaphor for more complex philosophical themes such as There Will Be Blood (2007), or semi-reconstructions like Open Range (2003) (lone gunfighters help small town) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007) (get the criminal to prison). Heck, classic Western novels got the cinematic treatment again like the Coen's True Grit (2010), and we even had hyper complex and cerebral character studies like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
One hopes that the superhero genre will be as fluid as the Western genre, since it's characters can basically be anything from the super rich (Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne), to the dirt poor, and yet still exist in the same 'verse.
So here's hoping that the Superhero genre simply goes method, and shifts and changes to blend in with the many other genres that cinema has to offer, instead of remaining stagnant.
Well said.