LEGENDS OF TOMORROW v The Modern Blockbuster
WB/The CWIn the last two years, cinemas have struggled with attendance numbers, pointing to lockdowns, capacity limits, and audience hesitancy. In the midst of the turmoil, studios have experimented with distribution models, which has led to box office roller coasters, and stars, studios, and story originators clashed over profits big and small from screens of the same proportions.
But it became apparent a global pandemic isn’t entirely to blame for lethargic blockbuster numbers. Even a captive audience wasn’t giving the same attention or reverence to many highlights of the summer movie season. Few releases in the last decade have been hailed as classics, instead classified as ‘events’ which will fade until revisited as part of a masochistic marathon session in preparation for Avengers 18.
In the middle of a drought of cinematic heavy hitters, consumers have been desperate for studios to feed them something attacking powerful villains, showing a variety of love conquering all, exploring true depth of despair, and revelling in spectacle which enjoys itself whether or not it has a grand scale of millions of indistinguishable creatures swarming a battlefield. Gauging from the majority of reviews and critiques, most movies released over the last few years – whether solely on big screens such as Tenet or hybrid releases such as Mulan – were too bland for audiences. Then Legends of Tomorrow Seasons 6 and 7 premiered, full of every necessary ingredient the tentpole cinematic menu neglected, making the case TV could preserve classical blockbusting pictures as we once knew them.
Recent mainstream summer films – broadly accessible, mostly US-generated big-box-office-numbers cinema – have lost heart and soul as certain kinds of storytelling, characters, sequences, and emotions have been exorcised. The most obvious symptom is the majority of blockbusters are now franchises, sequels, and reboots, but this itself is no sin. Harder to define is the exact vibe they’ve lost, a thousand hard-to-quantify elements adding up to the infamous “you know it when you see it.” Blockbuster storytelling has gone from subversive to subjecting itself to the party line; from raising fears and hackles to telling the story least likely to offend anyone with a dollar; from celebrating sweaty, lusty, joyous, complicated, broken people to depicting demigods engaged in a long game of galactic chess.
In losing a measure of grit, they have also become less gorgeous and glorious, transmuting from eye candy to eye mashed potatoes. Scorsese speaks truths we know deep down: even those who truly enjoy Marvel or DC films can see the colours are muddier, messages softer, sexuality blunted, eccentricity more muted, than cinema should be and has been. Despite 50 years of social, technological, and cinematic progress, movies are safer and tamer than when our parents lined up to buy tickets and popcorn for the latest Spielberg flick.
Before it became one long setup train running from three-hour character introduction to three hour teaser for next summer’s movie, tentpole films experimented with genre, showed sex and the grotesque, and set the tone for pop and culture rather than the other way around. Jaws changed the way commercial advertising and release dates ran; Alien took a script written for a man and cast a woman; Top Gun had an immediate and lasting impact on eyewear; Superman proved hard sci-fi and fantasy had mass appeal; They Live spoke truth to power and wasn’t afraid of an R rating; The Matrix played with social constructs, such as gender, and condemned corporate capitalism as well as innovating CGI techniques for lynchpin action sequences. What may seem small were at the time considered massive risks. Even when films didn’t work, it was often indicative of attempting innovation in story and technique, or writers and directors being allowed to experiment. Now films like The Shape of Water, which delve into those depths or push limits, are treated as niche or Oscar bait, starting with a festival run and limited release rather than marketed to a mass audience. As for blockbusters, not just experimenting, but bringing your own sensibility is an anathema, prospective directors are told everything is in place for them to merely point and click.
That dropped mantle of weirdness and boundary-pushing has been taken up by several TV shows, though not generally those in which the 'prestige' tag is pasted. The cape is currently best worn by a gem on The CW, an underdog on an underdog, which attracts mega talent who in yesteryear would have seen their names on cinema marquees: Victor Garber. Rachel Talalay. Lexi Alexander. Brandon Routh. When weird, colourful stories found no room at the cineplex, they diverted to the nearest shelter where they could come of age, where writers and directors are able to flex their muscles rather than cookie cutter stamp an assembly-line product.
Perhaps most fascinating is that superhero television – one of the biggest regurgitation machines and risk averse genres of 2000s cinema – is doing the heavy lifting to preserve the mighty old-school-vibe for the next generation of blockbuster. It is the most unsung yet best show in that universe we gather in praise of today: all hail Legends of Tomorrow, the best classic blockbuster film representation on any screen in this, the year of our Beebo, 2021.
Legends is one of several shows and spinoffs including The Flash, Supergirl, and Black Lightning, loosely referred to as the Arrowverse. Legends' first season was meant to begin the next evolution of small-screen superhero show, following a template akin to print comics: collect existing characters from Arrowverse shows (regular, recurring, or one-offs; living, dead, dead-and-resurrected, or time-travelled), put them in a SuperShow to come and go, crossover and spinoff. Its plan for a sprawling never-ending universe looked somewhat like phases laid out by the MCU and Star Wars film galaxy conglomerate.
Legends of Tomorrow’s first season was not particularly well-received, nor particularly good, so it took its second to wildly revamp both characters and approach. Instead of concentrating on existing IP plots and characters, it created its own. Instead of hewing to the more self-serious and heroic tone of the existing Arrowverse, it embraced a more unconventional approach and brighter shooting style. Along with a new ethos, it brought in new cast, changed its captain, and became what it remains: a ridiculous genre mashup; an ever-evolving juggernaut of call-backs, period pieces, redeemed villains and villainous heroes; a smorgasbord of homages to classic films and comic book panels, bright colours and ridiculous outfits; throwing occasional Big Events brimming with the magic blockbusters have been trying to replicate since the first Avengers.
Amongst the bombast and glitter, it doesn’t jettison difficult personal subject matter. Alongside Deadline-headline crossover events are intimate moments reminiscent of indie arthouse fare. These include fears about being a new parent, struggles with addiction and PTSD, coping with rejection and loss, and meditations about what it means to be human whether you’re a human or clone or alien or thrice-resurrected assassin-turned-time-traveller. Legends examines and reimagines how people from a wide variety of backgrounds, religions, and beliefs can come together, love and challenge each other – or just work for the greater good while learning to tolerate each other – and grow to be better versions of themselves.
Despite its range, Legends of Tomorrow isn’t particularly ‘cinematic’ in look or scope, so how will it birth a new cycle of cinematic vibes on The Big Screen again? By embodying the maverick heart and soul of old school blockbusters, and being unafraid of failure. By swinging for the fences with story and spectacle while – most crucially – keeping the core story in touch with problems and conflicts in the characters’ personal lives and thus the audience’s experiences. Making viewers gasp and laugh is little unless it tackles real world trauma. Legends doesn’t stop at ‘therapeutic escapism,’ but constantly confronts literal and metaphorical demons to prove our demons can be, if not defeated, made manageable.
As blockbuster ‘save the girl, the country, the world, the galaxy, the universe!’ plots have escalated, most of their grounded and even their metaphorical stakes have fallen by the wayside. Blockbusters may pay lip service to grief, but few commit to it. Formerly vivid metaphors, such as the alien dissection tent in E.T. or unavoidable loss of innocence The Return of the King, have been muted. Infinity War’s The Snap was the opposite of suspenseful or tragic; it may have ended Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, but the MCU trumpeted its irreversibility even as it ‘killed’ characters whose films were being advertised, then Endgame played Thor’s grief for fat jokes before reversing billions of deaths and moving on to the next instalment. Current blockbusters’ refusal to fully confront collateral damage other than how it impacts its titular heroes, egregious whitewashing and use of Middle East as a scapegoat, and thoughtless historical revisionism such as Hiroshima with real-world import, have been written about extensively.
Not only do most tentpoles go out of their way to avoid dealing with global trauma, especially trauma it causes, but instead of punching up, punches are pulled. Jaws became a 2020 meme about gross government dereliction of duty partly because current marquee movies aren’t willing to depict any such thing. Instead of even veiled or metaphorical condemnation of drone strikes and police brutality, tentpole movies are paid military propaganda. It’s fair to note blockbusters such as Top Gun have done similar things before, but that it’s considered the norm for nearly every film in the blockbuster behemoth universe of our day to merge literal superheroes and mythological beings with a US military actively invading in the way the MCU portrays various villainous aliens doing is a trick of ultimate cognitive dissonance. It’s not only on a large scale these large films fail to progress; forget condemning specific monsters, we can’t even see two women kiss, lest it cost a few dollars from the bottom line.
In the midst of a global pandemic, political turmoil, regressive and repressive policies, we’ve been desperate for a smashing spectacle, larger-than-life fun, and subversive energy, but we also want our art to speak truth to power. Movies can do all this via symbolism or extended metaphor, but also in casting and crew choices. Rather than being actually progressive, the blockbuster instead relies on ‘sometimes letting a woman or a not-white dude have their own poster, and letting one in twenty directors be one of those things, too.’ (That this is in some ways quantifiable progress shows how horribly safe filmmaking has played the last 40 years.) Every year we are promised a film is “groundbreaking!” because it features an offhand line about a guy having a boyfriend, or a woman in the background of a scene wears what could be construed as a hijab.
Meanwhile, Legends has quietly gone about featuring diversity while addressing racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and more. Discussions and whole episodes about discrimination have occurred throughout its run, but Season 7 set wholly in the 1920s spotlights the fact there’s only one straight white male in a crew of a dozen. The whole crew is in on the joke of playing that SWM Nate as a ‘trump card,’ but the show doesn’t avoid how most characters find life truly difficult. At various points Behrad, Spooner, Astra, and Gary are blatantly or ‘subtly’ racially profiled, while it’s made clear all discrimination stings, even the socially ‘polite’ kind. In one scene, Zari is unable to buy things because of her skin colour, while white Sara and Ava are treated with deference . . . only for townspeople to turn at best sneering, at worst homicidal, when it’s revealed they’re both queer.
Most of our lives are more diverse and colourful, figuratively and literally, than the lives projected on 18-of-20 local cinema screens. Legends embraces how diverse and messy reality can be: family units of all shapes and sizes and comfort levels, queerness of all kinds, booze and drug use and references overt and metaphorical, absentee parents, broken hearts, complicated relationships with exes, all depicted by a more diverse cast than most shows and movies dream of. Not merely less straight and white than your average show, Legends showcases and celebrates a variety of nationalities, ages, backgrounds, religious beliefs, and genders. It’s not perfect on any front, and some stories – particularly the first season – fumble a metaphor or outright drop the ball, but it does: slam cops in ways which would make John Carpenter and Alfred Hitchcock smile, frankly address time travel being more dangerous for the Black half of Firestorm, put queer characters kisses centre-screen instead of in a background corner to be digitally erased later, have multiple Muslim main characters who engage with and express their faith on a wide spectrum, and embrace the ridiculous plots, the distrust of authority, and the sheer rampant Spectacle of days of yore, where blockbusters such as Indiana Jones didn’t have to be polished within an inch of their lives so long as they made your jaw drop or belly shake or both.
With its TV budget, Legends is a prime modern example of picking which battles to show scale and which to have hand-to-hand combat tell the story. Using models, practical effects, puppets, and crafty editing to make things look more ‘real’ or expensive than they are. This is a throwback to those 70s and 80s blockbusters. Jaws is famous for relying on editing and suggestion when their animatronic sharks shorted out, but really most films had to use practical workarounds as opposed to relying on unlimited budget, and many were better for it. It's not that CGI can't be used to great effect, but relying on it leads to the dark side of complacency and not having to think of Plan B or C. Legend’s scrappy attitude of workarounds – which served them really well in pandemic-enforced shooting situations – is at the heart and soul of films such as Jurassic Park, The Terminator, and The Thing, and being forced to consider options often leads to a better, more creative result.
Part of that result is plot, dialogue, relationships, and other non-spectacle scenes take up more story space. Historically, blockbuster movies have often taken detours for scenes of mere appreciation, whether it’s a flurry of jokes and banter, or appreciating a sweeping vista for its own sake. They also incorporate smaller spectacles, such as song and/or dance numbers. Films like Kiss Me Deadly or Casablanca popularised songs, while other films incorporated music rather than throw a pop song or over-orchestrated score under an action sequence and call it a day. In the modern blockbuster’s need to introduce characters not just for the film you’re watching but its sequels, and making sure you note the group of women on a hill during a 30 minute CGI battle, there seems no time for such things. Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 features a few karaoke bits in its 100th episode, then in the next episode “Speakeasy Does It” stops twice for a cabaret number. That the second song is an original number which pays homage to the unusual love of two women who are fighting a Terminator-esque Herbert Hoover using circus silks is just a bonus.
The Legends know their pop culture and camp, memes and cinematic scenes, from Sisquo and shakeweights to John Noble and Marie Antoinette. “Meat: The Legends” was mostly on a sound stage because of pandemic, but made the most of it by leaning into The Last Days of the Condor imagery and The Thing effects. Director Rachel Talalay was able to put her signature spin on it, making it different from the episodes around it which themselves evidenced directorial voices. Throughout Legends, characters quote Dirty Harry and David Bowie, go back in time to meet a young George Lucas, and create an homage to E.T.’s flying bike as well as a John Woo-esque fight scene complete with flying dove. Of course there are prerequisite It’s a Wonderful Life and George Romero tribute episodes, and one of the best episodes in the series, “Here I Go Again”, isn’t being a play on Groundhog Day, but works because the characters immediately realise they’re doing a groundhog day. Legends has many defining features of old blockbusters that the current generation simply isn’t doing any more: a two-way dialogue with pop culture, embracing ridiculousness and slightly cheesy CGI effects, happy-ending-save-the-world right alongside permanent death and brutal fatalism. They deploy it all with joy and irreverence comfortable cohabitating, a balance most modern blockbusters lack in their need to keep things moving smoothly into the next franchise entry.
Entertainment doesn’t need to be cauterised; it should be messy and absurd and complicated. Love and light exist and thrive within challenge to corrupt authority, joy springs even in lockdown, growth comes amidst chaos, understanding can accompany death, terror and loss and betrayal don’t mean we’ll never love or be loved again. Legends is undyingly hopeful, even while things are bleak, characters die or regenerate into different beings or sell their souls to the devil. Season 6 ends by acknowledging some friends and loved ones must move on, and true love may not be enough to save a partner or a parent or yourself. Zari 2.0 says a final goodbye to a dying John, whose addictions and self-destructive behaviour couldn’t be ‘cured’ by her love. Spooner realises she may have reunited with her mother, but not only does it not replace their lost years, she will have to negotiate what ‘closure’ means, and how to move on now her raison d'etre and drive for vengeance is gone. Sara farewells her last original shipmate Rory, who goes to start his own family after years of grappling with the way his first daughter grew up without him. Legends knows we can disappoint those we love most and they may not choose to forgive us, but ultimately, Legends is a monument to the idea struggling to do better than we did yesterday is hard but worthwhile work. It holds that hope alongside paranoia, a healthy mistrust of authority, and a giant tickle-me-Elmo-knockoff trying to take over the world. We can only see this spectrum when willing to paint with the whole palette of pain and darkness as well as love and light.
That ‘love and light’ come in many forms, but so do lust and sex, historically venerated in classic blockbusters but with a recent precipitous drop-off. Total Recall shows more skin and sex in its opening scenes than all Batman film of the last 20 years. When Point Break isn’t centring its romance, it’s highlighting its homoromanticism and sexual tension. Problematic nature of some of James Bond’s depictions of sex aside, it does revel in a revealing dress, a tight pair of swim trunks, a romp in the hay or in space. We want lusty blockbusters, messy kisses before near-certain death, a variety of people shown wanting and yearning and sometimes getting off with each other, but despite the emphasis on statuesque physiques, recent blockbusters have become decidedly sex averse, even the last Bond flick eschewing sex for a few plunging necklines.
In the time it takes for Tony Stark to kiss Pepper Potts twice, Legend’s openly bisexual Captain Sara Lance sleeps with: a billionaire vigilante playboy, the bad-girl-gone-good daughter of a supervillain assassin, Queen Guinevere, John Constantine, not one but two heads of para-governmental organisations dedicated to preserving earth from aliens and time aberrations, and half a dozen minor characters through space and time. After a classic “haters turned lovers” arc, by-the-book clone Ava became Sara Lance’s co-captain and wife in the Season 6 finale.
Meanwhile John Constantine got hot and heavy with his share of male and female lovers and romances, perpetually puppy-dog-eyed serial monogamist Nate had two long heartbreaking romances, hot shapeshifter Charlie strutted her stuff and shagged a few punks, and every chance is taken for Ray Palmer to take his shirt off and/or kiss his real life wife and fictional evil nemesis. There’s also as much leather as a superhero show should have, discussion of kink, bodice-rippers, and tentacle sex, and Googling “Arrowverse salmon ladder” pulls up many hot-bodied characters gamely objectifying themselves complete with baby-oiled abs, because they know what the people want.
What the people want includes the concept of sex being fun and for everyone. Most blockbusters today use ‘sexually promiscuous’ as code for ‘evil’ or at least unreliable. When Tony Stark sleeps with various reporters – all off-screen – he’s a ‘bad boy.’ When Bruce Wayne wants to play up his anti-Batman image, he does it by arriving with multiple scantily-clad, non-speaking-part women at a restaurant. When Bond needs to be rakish, he gets laid. When they want to reform Tony Stark, he starts sleeping with one woman, just like every other coded-good Avenger. Bruce Wayne settles for abstinent, tortured pining for Rachel. Bond isn’t going to reform, so he can keep having casual sex. Legends refutes this false dichotomy, recognising sexual taste doesn’t make you more or less moral than anyone, so long as everyone is consenting adults. Sara’s romps through history, Gary’s various kinks, Rory’s penchant for steamy fanfiction, Zari 1.0’s staid love of Good Guys and Zari 2.0’s lust for bad boys, Nate’s serial monogamy, are all treated as equally valid.
Love isn’t merely about sexytimes. Legends respects bonds and love of strong friendship as much as it respects the bonds and love romantic and familial; sometimes more, as though to make up for society already respecting and/or insisting on romance and blood-family over found family and friendship. The show’s premise is a bunch of misfits making a found family, but it also develops smaller intimate bonds between characters and explores how those loves can be as deep and meaningful as age-spanning romances. Nate and Ray’s friendship is a peak example, an unabashed love of two straight men constantly affirming each other. Their goodbye episode is “Romeo v Juliet: Dawn of Justness” in a nod to Brandon Routh’s past as Superman, which acknowledges their relationship is a type of intense, passionate, star-crossing love. In the season since Ray left, two newer legends, Astra and Spooner, have been developing their own partnership, helping each other heal from their respective deep trauma and becoming mother-figures to a newly corporeal AI. Characters discuss how important friendship and community are, and explore them in detail lacking on most big screen behemoths, putting their money where their mouth is even when it’s not easy. If there's one thing Legends loves, it's subverting social expectations and genre conventions which manifest as constrictions in current tentpole cinema.
Between the constant churn and pathological drive to ensure every movie funnels into the next, the new blockbuster prioritises big speeches for emotional work, intent on pushing ‘ending’ with nothing self-contained or permanently resolved. Even the occasional Logan, which definitively ends a character arc, still ties into at least two other franchise films and sets up another potential spinoff. That mentality has bled over to the small screen in negative ways, where WandaVision sweeps consequences under the rug for the next MCU entry, and any 'plot bottle' episodes from “The Fly” to “Beard After Hours” spark backlash because we've been conditioned that everything must comment on/directly connect to the Bigger Picture which can never truly finish. The current blockbuster must push off growth, consequences, death, catharsis, or characters actually hooking up on screen with the repeating promise it’ll happen if you just come back next time.
Movies have always had remakes (A Star Is Born), made sequels good and foolhardy (Back to the Future, The Two Jakes), and cheekily set up the next film with their final line or the villain living on, but they still told their own stories within the runtime. Legends understands and follows this classic blockbuster style: actually climaxing, then finishing episodic and seasonal stories while still teasing those to come. The key difference being the 'ones to come' are truly new chapters, not constantly-prolonged, shoved-off resolutions. In storytelling as in marketing, they’re doing things big-screen bigger-budget movies aren't. Even their season posters understand the assignment and their place in the zeitgeist: most would be at home on a 70s marquee, and Season 6's official cover art involves a VHS, that most ubiquitous movie format of the 80s.
Everything is cyclical; what has been will be again, so it goes. Hopefully soon we’ll get back to film slates where big blockbusters are subversive, sexy, anti-authoritarian, show a wide range of heroines, reflect more facets of society, and take real risks on actors and creators who tell the stories. When they do, they can look to and learn from Legends, who in the words of Man of Steel Nate Heywood, sometimes screw things up for the better.
In the meantime, if you want what used to be a Saturday matinee experience, from bright colours and discernible stunt performers to smaller stakes of saving your best friend or your hometown or just your own existence; if you want to see a stuffed animal turned Kaiju rampaging Viking villages and downtown New York-esque vistas alike; if you want a series of time travel paradoxes and bumbles and mind-melting loops as good as any a sorcerer supreme can cook up; if you want a big gay wedding to culminate in a laser battle, a flash of light, and saving the world while saying a permanent good bye to old friends, you’ll be more likely to find it on Legends, this generation’s blockbuster machine.