Zeitgeist of the Decade: How Comic Book Movies Transitioned From a Curiosity to a Cultural Phenomenon

THE DARK KNIGHT / WARNER BROS

It is hard to imagine a summer blockbuster season without a whole bunch of high-profile comic book movie juggernauts shattering box office records and earning widespread acclaim among fans and critics alike. Many studios – with varying levels of success – continue to map out their cinematic universes, network stations and streaming platforms keep churning out TV show adaptations of lesser-known comic book properties and graphic novels at break-neck speeds, while the popular culture is slowly becoming saturated with meme language of nods to spandex-clad superheroes, demigods and arch-villains. Even politicians have started incorporating references to Thanos’s infamous snap or The Incredible Hulk’s anger management issues into their vernacular! 

And yet, not too long ago, things used to be different. Despite their long history spanning all the way to the pre-WWII Hollywood with such examples as Flash Gordon (1936) and Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), comic book adaptations were viewed as a campy curiosity. Hollywood filmmakers have been trying to plant them within a wider cultural consciousness for decades, but only with limited and short-lived success. Although Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman can be counted among the more memorable achievements in this regard, the real game-changing breakthrough came in 2008 with the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Marvel’s Iron-Man. The critical and commercial success of these films – bolstered by the previous box office performance of the X-Men series and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies – proved to producers that considerable money was to be made on the back of comic book adaptations. Critics became convinced that such movies didn’t have to be campy oddballs destined for cult classic obscurity, provided that talented filmmakers were involved in producing these projects. Artists themselves were warming up to the idea of exploring their own interests using a comic book movie template. Most importantly, the audiences were ready to embrace them. Thus, a critical mass was reached and what had gestated for so long as a quirky trend with a niche appeal and little prospects of sustainability was rapidly transformed into a widely accessible platform for artistic expression and – crucially – a cash cow. 

Even though the origins of this cultural breakthrough can be traced to the latter half of the ‘noughties’, the bulk of what amounts to a renaissance in the sphere of comic book movies took place over the course of this past decade. Marvel Studios have become a major player in the moviemaking business and continued to reign supreme after their acquisition by Disney. Other major studios have also attributed a good chunk of their financial success to their involvement in the widespread drive to conceptualize, adapt and market even some of the most obscure comic book properties into a film format. It has become customary to expect billion-dollar box office revenues from comic book movie adaptations. Some, like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, have gone on to break various records and have successfully infiltrated the wider cultural consciousness, let alone the meme-infested online communities of hardcore fandom. 

While the immense and lasting take-over of the blockbuster season proves unequivocally that a tectonic shift in the film industry has taken place in the last decade, more interesting changes have been afoot in the narrative and thematic spheres of comic book movies. The array of storytelling archetypes handled in those movies has continued to expand together with their growing appreciation. The template of a comic book adaptation has outgrown the limited expectations of an origin story and a ‘hero vs nemesis’ device as filmmakers began distilling genres and other aspects of the popular culture into this format, probing the scope of its malleability. They gained enough confidence to experiment and ask what would happen if, for instance, they made a spy thriller in a comic book world (Captain America: Winter Soldier), a Shakespearean drama with a dash of a fish-out-of-water comedy (Thor), a coming-of-age teen dramedy (Spider-Man: Homecoming), a space opera (Guardians Of The Galaxy) or a gritty western (Logan).

In line with the above-mentioned evolution of narrative complexity and scope, this past decade saw a marked change in the thematic matter handled by high-profile comic book movies. Of course, examples of artistically involved films adapted from comic books and graphic novels breaching the comfort zone of escapism is found in the past. However, only recently it has become somewhat expected for big blockbusters about caped superheroes and demigods to carry an accessible layer of thematic subtext beneath their narrative edifice, perfunctory as it may be at times. A viewer is now openly invited to peek beneath the glossy finish of big studio tentpoles to find commentary on female empowerment (Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel), race (Black Panther), alcoholism and PTSD (Iron-Man 3) and more abstract themes like American messianism (Man Of Steel), the threat of artificial intelligence, the pressing environmental emergency – the list goes on and on. Some, like Todd Philips’s Joker, are designed from the ground up with a social commentary in mind. Whether these attempts are successful, poignant or otherwise enriching is a separate question. What matters is the fact that finding a layer of thematic subtext or any kind of commentary in big effects-laden tentpole releases no longer requires the viewer to become a mental contortionist. 

This is how seemingly disconnected approaches towards popular ideas develop organically to become genres. Comic book movies are no longer a strangely misshapen subdivision of science-fiction or fantasy but rather their own thing. They have their own aesthetic definition and a set of formal expectations, which are completely separate from other genres in contemporary cinema. Just like the word ‘western’ can be immediately associated with gunslingers, horses, train robberies and Apaches, the phrase ‘comic book movie’ comes with its own instant associations. It is a fully-equipped toolbox of archetypes, aesthetic choices and thematic anchoring points for any filmmakers to deploy. 

However, the true test of genre robustness involves a shift from adapting pre-existing matter towards using the template to create brand new content. In the early days of cinema, the genre of horror was almost completely reliant on stories adapted from literature. As the medium developed and a set of aesthetic expectations crystallized around horror films, filmmakers became more confident inventing completely new stories and archetypal modalities that permanently severed the umbilical cord connecting horror movies with classics of literary gothic horror. 

The same process has been in operation as comic book adaptations were metamorphosizing from campy curiosities to become blockbuster mainstay tentpoles and a genre unto itself. In fact, some early examples of comic book movies not based on actual comic books can be found in the 1980s (Toxic Avenger), 1990s (Darkman) and 2000s (Unbreakable, Hancock). Again, as the mainstream juggernauts were gaining in prominence and saturating the release slates worldwide, other more off-beat original films utilizing the same toolbox were also becoming more frequent and adventurous. For instance, James Gunn’s Super was an indie play on Taxi Driver with a superhero slant, Josh Trank’s Chronicle a found-footage thriller and the 2019’s Brightburn a supernatural horror movie drawing heavily from Richard Donner’s The Omen and the Superman mythos. In early 2017, M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, an open love letter to Alfred Hitchcock, was released to wide acclaim. Joined at the hip to the aforementioned Unbreakable and followed up with Glass, it attempted to forge its own unique mythology, completely independent of anything found in the vast body of comic book precedence. 

Looking at the development of other genres across the axis of time, it would be foolish to assume comic book movie era has reached its apex yet. After all, the genre of western did not peak with Stagecoach nor did horror with 1931’s Dracula. The world of comic book movies has yet to find its Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. However, one thing is clear – the tools are all there and the stage is set.