Superhero movies have long poked fun at their source material, with characters reminding Peacemaker that he wears a toilet bowl for a head or smirking at the name “Otto Octavius.” While these moments do act as invitations to casual fans, ensuring everyone involved that, yes, we know these things are silly, they also work to devalue the material. The best video game movies celebrate the oddities of the games, while the worst superhero entries are, well, Thor: Love and Thunder or She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which condescend to the viewer as much as they do the comics.
Give the People the What They Want
Some gorgeous animation notwithstanding, no one would contend that the new Super Mario Bros. movies are quality cinema. But they earn millions at the box office, in part, because audiences know the characters. The films don’t just focus on Mario and Luigi, Bowser and Peach. Other oddities burst from the screen, from Dry Bones to Kamek to Rosalina to Wart. The marketing for Street Fighter uses the same strategy, filling the screen with Ken and Ryu in their gis, Guile with a flattop, and Chun-Li her qipao.
The cynic would dismiss these instances as fan service, and they’d be right. But the films want to appeal to fans by taking the beloved stuff from the games and putting it on screen, regardless of realism.
For a while, it felt like the MCU followed suit. As opposed to the ’80s and ’90s, when the Punisher didn’t have a skull logo and Batman mounted machine guns on the Batmobile, Iron Man put Tony Stark in a red and gold suit and Captain America gained his powers from the super soldier serum. But, even then, the movies took liberties that grew increasingly annoying. Peter Parker, a guy who made a deal with the devil to protect his secret identity (and save Aunt May, I know, I know) regularly goes unmasked because we can’t hide Tom Holland‘s mug.
It’s time for comic book movies to just do the characters people love in the costumes they expect, just like the video games are doing.
Do The Thing We Love
For moviegoers of a certain age, cinema reached its peak when a baby zombie dropped onto a chicken, prompting Jack Black to utter this generation’s version of “I could have been a contender” or “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Those words are, of course, “Chicken jockey.”