SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Before taking off a few days, Scott Detrow held one of his weekly movie conversations. This week's is about superheroes in film. Scott takes it from here.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Let's start this next conversation with the most iconic, trope-y, often referenced line in the "Spider-Man" universe.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPIDER-MAN")
CLIFF ROBERTSON: (As Ben Parker) With great power comes great responsibility.
DETROW: Because when it comes to the movie industry, superhero movies have seemingly become all-powerful. They have set the tone and the financial picture for Hollywood for nearly 20 years. But are they using that power responsibly? Two new superhero reboots are currently in theaters, already earning hundreds of millions of dollars between them. We've got Superman...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SUPERMAN")
RACHEL BROSNAHAN: (As Lois Lane) Superman.
DAVID CORENSWET: (As Superman) Miss Lane.
BROSNAHAN: (As Lois Lane) Recently, you've come under a lot of fire for what some might...
CORENSWET: (As Superman) I don't know if it's a lot of fire.
BROSNAHAN: (As Lois Lane) It's a lot.
DETROW: ...And "The Fantastic Four: The First Steps."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Famous around the world - please welcome The Fantastic Four.
(CHEERING)
DETROW: What do these two releases tell us about the current state of the superhero movie? To get into that, I am joined by Glen Weldon, cohost of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and author of the book "Superman: The Unauthorized Biography," and Marc Rivers, a producer of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED and the author of "I Hate All Superhero Films: A 900-Page Opus."
(LAUGHTER)
MARC RIVERS, BYLINE: Fake news.
DETROW: Welcome to both of you.
RIVERS: Hey, Scott.
GLEN WELDON, BYLINE: Hey, Scott. Hey, Marc.
DETROW: Glen, let's just start with this moment. We have two reboots of often-rebooted franchises. The Fantastic Four, like, infamously, the franchise that every time they remake it, it stinks, but this time they seem to have kind of gotten it right. Like, what broadly does this moment tell us?
WELDON: I mean, you call them reboots. I call them resets. I think both of these movies, "Superman" and "Fantastic Four," are doing exactly what needs to be done after many, many years of subpar superhero movies, which were subpar because they all labored under the same delusion. And that delusion is that what audiences want out of superheroes is, across the board, groundedness (ph) and realism and relevance. That's dumb. It's always been dumb. We need a break from that. So what both of these movies do is kind of take a power washer to the whole idea of the superhero to remove all that grim, gray, gritty gunk that's accumulated to them over the years and revealed that underneath it, there's these bold primary colors that were, you know, how they were originally made. It is now - we are living through - the summer of the sunny superhero, and I'm here for it because my heart is not a desiccated husk. Over to you, Marc.
DETROW: (Laughter).
RIVERS: I think it says a lot that a lot of the responses I've seen about these two movies are about what they are not doing or what they aren't. They aren't so dark and grim. They don't exceed 2 1/2 hours.
DETROW: I appreciate that.
RIVERS: You don't have to go in having watched 12 other movies or episodes. But I think we've been grading on a curve here in that we've gotten so far away from par for these movies that just meeting par is worth celebrating. But for me, I'm not celebrating.
DETROW: Glen, let me ask you - that is a good moment to ask about this shift. Like, let's go back to the moment of "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" that we kind of look back on, and, like, this is the reset of the superhero movie and kind of the creation of the superhero movie blocking out the sun of all other movies that we've been living at (ph). Like, you hit on the one trend...
WELDON: Right.
DETROW: ...That we've seen of the gritty realism. The Nader of which is "Batman V. Superman," which is...
WELDON: Sure, the (inaudible).
DETROW: ...Just, like, an atrocious (inaudible) - yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE")
JESSE EISENBERG: (As Lex Luthor) The greatest gladiator match in the history of the world - god versus man, son of Krypton versus bat of Gotham.
DETROW: But are there other big ways that these movies have shifted and themes that we have seen over this 20-year period?
WELDON: Well, I think what's more noticeable is what hasn't changed because you're right. "Dark Knight" was successful. Hollywood loves a formula, and both Marvel and Warners are guilty of deciding that if something works once, it's going to work every time regardless of the character, and that's their fatal flaw. They're ignoring the appeal of the comics, which offers incredibly deep benches of characters about whom you could tell very different stories in different ways, with different tones, and maybe then if they did that, they'd stop painting every hero like their Batman with this same broad brush of dark, grim and gritty.
You don't have to keep going back to the same five superheroes. That's another thing. It's not about name recognition when it comes to these guys. Nobody knew who the Guardians of the Galaxies (ph) were, for example. It's about telling a story that is well-fitted to the character. I think if they do that, they might even win over for the Marcs of the world. They got a chance anyway.
DETROW: Well, I don't know about that. Marc, take your hater self out of here.
RIVERS: It's not even in here.
DETROW: Like, let's, like, go back to the rosebud moment of Marc. Like, was there a point in time and superhero movie that worked for you?
RIVERS: I think so. And I would say it was probably the time before the kind of dominance of superhero movies when they were still kind of finding their footing, forging their own paths, and there wasn't already a well-paved path to trod and to follow and follow again and again. I think about "Spider-Man 2." I could be talking about three different "Spider-Man 2's" at this point.
DETROW: Yeah, yeah. (Laughter) Which "Spider-Man 2" are you talking about?
WELDON: (Laughter).
RIVERS: But I'm thinking specifically of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 2" back in 2004.
DETROW: Yeah. This is the Doc Ock one with (inaudible).
RIVERS: It's the Doc Ock one, Alfred Molina.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPIDER-MAN 2")
ALFRED MOLINA: (As Doc Ock/Dr. Otto Octavius) Peter Parker and the girlfriend.
TOBEY MAGUIRE: (As Spider-Man/Peter Parker) What do you want?
MOLINA: (As Doc Ock/Dr. Otto Octavius) I want you to find your friend, Spider-Man.
RIVERS: And this one feels so content not being a superhero movie, even though it has the action scenes. It has the colors and the lively cast. And there's this great scene in this movie that I think speaks to the kind of emotional heights these movies could reach. And it's when Peter Parker is telling the truth to his Aunt May about his kind of inadvertent role in the death of Uncle Ben.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPIDER-MAN 2")
MAGUIRE: (As Spider-Man/Peter Parker) The thief was running towards me. I could have stopped him, but I wanted revenge. So I let him go.
RIVERS: There's a moment where Peter, you know, rests his hand on Aunt May's hand and she just lets it slide out from under his. And it's so delicate and so painful. You just - you want to look away. But, like, that scene just has an emotional range that eludes so many other comic book movies for me because it was - that was still when superhero movies were still kind of in their infancy, still kind of testing the grounds.
WELDON: And I think when people talk about superhero fatigue - and I've been writing about superheroes for a long time; I've been writing about superhero fatigue for just as long - they're really talking about genre fatigue, right? Genres have tropes. Tropes get repetitive. I'm sure in the '30s, people like Marc were very rightly saying, do we need another gangster film? And in the '50s, people were like, oh, another Western - great. Is there a shootout? Does somebody say, go run fetch the sheriff? And in the aughts, people were like, wait, another rom-com where Judy Greer plays the best friend and at some point, says, go to him.
DETROW: (Laughter).
WELDON: Familiarity breeds contempt, and we've become familiar with this big studio, one-size-fits-all approach to superheroes. The difference is that in the past, Hollywood would respond to declining box office by saying, well, nobody's going to see Westerns. We'll make fewer Westerns. The difference now is that superhero is a very expensive IP, and instead of letting them have their moment in the sun, studios are going to keep cranking these movies out trying to get the most from their investment. And in that environment, the only thing to do is what these two movies, "Superman" and "Fantastic Four," this summer have done, which is to switch it up, to go back to basics, commit to the bit, embrace the joy and the imagination of comics. I mean, stop apologizing for being a comic book movie. Stop apologizing for being about superheroes, which is what these films have done for years now.
DETROW: Which is funny because, like, in the end, these are people who wear spandex with ridiculous names flying through the sky, and we're like, how can we make them more realistic?
RIVERS: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
RIVERS: And I think in comparison to those, like, other genres that Glen mentioned - the Western, the gangster film - is that these stars were still primary in those movies, you know, like, people like James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne. They became these icons, and they were what loom large. And now, you know, it's the IP that looms large. It's not...
DETROW: Well...
RIVERS: It's less the actors than it is the actual product.
DETROW: I don't know. Like, Robert Downey Jr. - Iron Man - I feel like that's an iconic role. You go back, like - like, I feel like Michael Keaton, even decades later, looms as Batman.
RIVERS: I would say with the MCU, specifically, other than Robert Downey Jr., I don't know if the Falcon has turned Anthony Mackie into an icon, or it's turned Chris Hemsworth into...
DETROW: I don't see Paul Rudd and go, oh, my God, it's Ant-Man.
RIVERS: Yeah.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: No one sees - like, people still see Paul Rudd...
DETROW: Sure.
RIVERS: ...And they think "Clueless." You know, they don't think Ant-Man.
WELDON: (Laughter).
RIVERS: And I think there's a reason why we've had so many iterations of a Batman or a Superman or Spider-Man. It's because these actors are ultimately pretty interchangeable.
DETROW: All right. So like, Marc, you talked about "Spider-Man 2." But, like, Glen, I'm curious - like, what to you is, like, the Platonic ideal of a superhero movie in the last two decades?
WELDON: I think, Scott, the best superhero movie of all time is "The Incredibles."
DETROW: Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE INCREDIBLES")
CRAIG T NELSON: (As Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible) Every superhero has a secret identity. I don't know a single one who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?
WELDON: It's not tied down to IP. It's not beholden to anything. It is just its own thing, and it's also animated, which means you can take the fact that there's no, you know, special effects budget on a comic book page and just explode it and just be a movie that makes you want to cheer, which is what, you know, these films have not been doing for a very long time. That movie shows people with power using that power to help other people. And I wish we lived in a time when that didn't feel like escapism, but it does. I mean, these movies model a kind of selflessness and empathy and drive to make the world a better place, and that movie did it great.
DETROW: Are you saying that they have power and they use it responsibly?
WELDON: (Laughter) They use it with responsibility, yes.
RIVERS: They have power, and they had a script to work with as well on "The Incredibles." And speaking of animation, I think what I would say in the last two decades is "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE")
SHAMEIK MOORE: (As Miles Morales) My name is Miles Morales. I'm Brooklyn's one and only Spider-Man.
RIVERS: That movie, in comparison to some of these live action films, which have, for me, this kind of sleek plasticity that - you know, it's hard to distinguish between that and, like, a Super Bowl ad to me or, like, a video game. But, like, "Across The Spider-Verse," to me, it's just this explosion of creativity and imagination on the screen. And you can tell the artists involved are trying things and taking risks.
DETROW: The animation is part of the story in a way.
RIVERS: The animation is part of the story. How we think about canon...
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: ...And who gets to be a part of that canon is a part of the story. And it's just a moment-to-moment delight and wonder.
DETROW: That is NPR's Glen Weldon and Marc Rivers. Thanks to both of you.
RIVERS: Thanks, Scott.
WELDON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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