Ark of the Lost Angels

Regal movie theater in Nashville (Credit: bresslau)

Hollywood’s current philosophies echo the fall of the studio system in the 1960s thanks to the rise of superhero movies.

Much criticism has been given to today’s trends in storytelling, especially films. The eternal battle between art and commerce favors commerce almost every time. Art cannot exist as a viable industry without needing to bring some return in investment, but Hollywood especially has become stagnant much like it did in the studio system of the 1950s. The collapse of the tight studio control and epics which never resonated with audiences nor recouped their insane budgets and spectacles was replaced by a wave of auteur filmmaking by the people who became giants over the last several decades: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, and other contemporaries.

New Hollywood represented a rebellion against the then-dominating paradigm within films. Hollywood was safe, family-friendly, oftentimes overwrought, and increasingly out of touch with the nation. With the rise of television came the decline in audiences coming out to the theaters, and the studios believed that if they doubled down on the spectacles, then audiences would return to see the kinds of productions only the cinema could produce.

And they were wrong.

Audiences had become fed up with the restrictive nature of movies thanks to the Hays Code and the inertia of massive studios. The problems with corporate stagnation have been written about here before. The studios believed that they knew best about the entertainment world. However, when the Hays Code was adopted in the mid-1930s, it was in response to moralist outrage with some valid concerns based on the behavior of Hollywood stars. It was a self-imposed list of acceptable material that the studios agreed to in order to guide how they created their films. The idea was to keep Hollywood seen as moral in wide audiences, and give them entertainment which would be acceptable to audiences struggling with the Great Depression in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

By the mid-1960s, however, the generations which were born during and after the Second World War had come of age, and were breaking out into the world themselves. It was an era of profound change in the nation, where the old order was being rejected with the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the anti-war sentiment surrounding Vietnam which would only grow stronger as the decade wore on, as well as the broader peace movements and more overt embrace of the hippie philosophies originated by the beat generation a decade prior.

While there were many directors who tried to push the limits of the Hays Code in its time, the studios still held the purse strings, the actors’ contracts, and the power. It was that decision making that led to the code being maintained, and the types of movies which were popular at the time (musicals, massive epics, etc.) continuing to be produced in massive numbers. By the late 1950s, thanks to work from directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, the Hays Code was beginning its demise. It became a relic of the studio age, as future directors were looking to make their own mark on film. New Hollywood happened because the studios, groaning under the weight of massive debts from successive gambles that didn’t pay off, finally stumbled just enough for the next generation of filmmakers to make their marks and rewrite the playbook.

Spielberg brought a sense of adventure to audiences, Coppola delved into the darker psyches of America’s rougher parts, Lucas took audiences to see fantastic new worlds in a galaxy far far away. They had their chances because society was changing, and they became the dominant forces for the next several generations. By the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, America was feeling a sense of restlessness. Some of the films that best encapsulated the fears of the decade: Office Space, American Beauty, and Fight Club, were centered around the dissatisfaction the average American worker had with his comfortable life. The restlessness and uncertainty of what happens after being one of many at the supposed mountaintop led to a cultural phenomenon where the biggest fear was being trapped in a safe, ‘boring’ job forever and not dealing with massive struggles. The conflicts in the 1990s were all happening in exotic, faraway places like the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. With the victory over the Soviet Union and the decade of relative peace, most Americans were under the mistaken assumption that life was safe. Then 9/11 happened, and America became obsessed with finding heroes to keep it safe. The saccharine world that ended almost exactly 25 years ago was replaced by one in which fear was the dominant force. Movies became gritter; suddenly, audiences didn’t want to see charming playboy James Bond with an invisible car, they wanted to see amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne taking revenge against the amoral apparatus of the state which abandoned laws and morals to keep people safe but really turned against their own interests. Americans wanted heroes that were noble and just that could keep them safe from the seriousness of the times.

Hollywood was only too happy to oblige. 

The Age of Heroes

Today’s Hollywood is dominated by superhero films. Ever since 2005’s ‘Batman Begins’ (directed by modern-day cinematic phenom Christopher Nolan) showed that superhero films could be about superheroes doing what they do best while taking themselves seriously as movies and presenting superheroes in a way to mass audiences without being cheesy or campy the way previous superhero flicks did. It was a reaction to the post-9/11 fear and general grimness throughout society, but it also was an attempt by filmmakers to be taken seriously in the superhero genre. While the Sam Raimi-directed Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films are beloved for their nostalgia factor, the movies themselves have an element of camp to them. Which is not necessarily bad for a comic book film, especially one directed by Sam Raimi. But audiences wanted something different, and Christopher Nolan was able to give them something like that, and opened the door for the two-fer of 2008, one of which would be his beloved followup to Batman Begins, the Dark Knight. The other began Robert Downey Jr.’s second act with his first appearance as Iron Man to kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

While Batman Begins was the first in the ‘serious’ era of superhero films, the idea of taking a comic book movie seriously took hold in audiences’ minds with that aforementioned double whammy in 2008, and a large number of people would attribute the phenomenon to Iron Man alone, simply because it launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU’s interconnectivity made the age of superhero films feel like something special. Seldom did multiple films culminate in a massive blockbuster the way the MCU Phase 1 did with the Avengers in 2012. You saw the origin stories for most of the main heroes in this team over the course of their own movies so that you got to pick up with an action-packed adventure when The Avengers started.

In contrast, the DC films, which began their own cinematic universe with 2013’s Man of Steel, tried to jump straight to a Civil War-esque event with 2016’s Batman v. Superman: The Dawn of Justice. The problem was, by the time Marvel had reached adapting the Civil War arc in 2016, there had been twelve films in the MCU. That was twelve movies, including two Avengers films, for audiences to get to know these characters and form their opinions before the cast of heroes was set against each other. In contrast, Batman v. Superman had to introduce Batman, Lex Luthor and Wonder Woman in the same film, and build the characters up enough for the conflict between Batman and Superman to be believable. No wonder why it fell flat. In Civil War, the only new heroes the audiences are meeting are Black Panther (who has a very believable reason to be part of the main plot: his father is killed; also serves to establish character motivation very easy) who then receives an immediate followup in his solo film which released eighteen months later, and Spider-Man who is an extremely limited supporting-role ahead of his own solo outing the following year.

Spider-Man’s inclusion touches on an interesting quirk of the Marvel movies’ origins. The MCU chose the Avengers as its centerpiece for rights-related reasons. Marvel was strapped for cash in the 1990s and sold the film rights to Spider-Man to Sony and the rights to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men to Fox. The rights to a solo Hulk movie were sold to Universal under a different deal, which is why there are two different Hulk movies within five years of each other with different actors, retelling the origin story.

Fox’s tenure with the X-Men rights led to a trio of fairly successful films around the respected team of mutants, and some spinoffs of varying quality. A quasi-reboot (which ended up becoming an origin story and then led to a whole new universe thanks to time travel multiversal shenanigans) with 2011’s X-Men First Class tried to take on the MCU, but the varying quality of the Fox X-Men movies meant that the latter ones were mostly forgotten by the time Disney purchased Fox which returned the rights to the X-Men back to Marvel. The Fantastic Four had two mildly successful movies in the few years before Iron Man’s debut, and a very unsuccessful reboot amidst the MCU’s peak. The 2008 Incredible Hulk movie is technically part of the MCU, but the part of Bruce Banner was recast with Mark Ruffalo starting with the Avengers.

As a result of the rights being scattered to the winds, Marvel had one last team under their ownership. While the X-Men were their premier team in the comics, the Avengers were basically a bunch of C-Listers. With the right casting for Tony Stark, a fresh take on the genre which blended reality with enough of that comic book charm to hit just right with audiences, and a little luck, Iron Man became inventive. Then it, ironically, set a solid formula for the MCU to use for almost two decades now.

DC, the other major superhero rights holder, tried desperately to catch up, and fell flat. Their attempt at building their own cinematic universe was an attempt at cashing in on Marvel’s success without laying the groundwork as to why Marvel became so successful. Instead of showing the origin stories again for many successful heroes, DC could have easily jumped into a world where Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. were all active and running around being heroes. They chose, instead, to show the origin stories once again, and often times, do so after the debuts of the characters in film. Wonder Woman’s origin (one of the highlights of the old DCEU) doesn’t get told until after her debut in Batman v. Superman, and her movie comes out after Suicide Squad, about an almost completely unrelated team of villains trying to be good under extreme duress. Suicide Squad had no effect on the larger DCEU at the time, but there it was, trying to copy the style of Guardians of the Galaxy without understanding what made Guardians work within the MCU: peeling back layers to the cosmic side of the universe which had only been previously glimpsed at with a team of lovable rogues and its own style. DC failed to make the style fun to watch, the rogues lovable, and the universe bigger. It speaks to the pitfalls many studios fell into while trying to follow in Marvel’s footsteps. Most of them lost what made the MCU so successful in the first place, in that the MCU tried something new and gave audiences a different experience than they were used to.

The trend following did not end at just superheroes either.

The Case Against Origin Stories

One of the MCU’s bigger impacts on movies at large is an obsession with origin stories. Because so many comic books introduce a new character with their origin story, it becomes a very natural place to begin introducing a character to audiences in the theater. The snag is that for the majority of heroes like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, almost everyone knows these origin stories. They’re so famous that pop culture has been parodying or referencing them for decades. Even heroes a grade lower like Captain America or Iron Man (pre-MCU) were distinctive enough that people with minimal comic knowledge knew the broad strokes or at least a little about who they were and how they got their start. 

When superheroes took over the box office, showing how they became the hero audiences are familiar with them as became a major draw. However, we’re 38 movies into the MCU at this point. There are only so many times that seeing a hero get their powers, deal with threats they’re not used to, have their normal lives interrupted and their friends placed in danger, and so on can be compelling. What’s worse is that for some famous heroes, we’ve seen the same origin stories over and over again in film. The Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman films from 1989 to 1997 told the origin story we all know and love: Bruce Wayne is the son of rich parents, they’re killed outside a theater, traumatizing the child and inspiring him to become Batman. Then the Christopher Nolan films told that origin story again with 2005’s Batman Begins, where Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne grapples with wanting to do something with his skills to avenge his parents and save his city. And then we tackle it again with Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne in Batman v. Superman in 2016. Same thing with Spider-Man. We saw the origin story in 2002 with the first Sam Raimi film: Spider-Tobey gets bit by the radioactive spider, becomes a cage fighter, Uncle Ben gets killed, Peter Parker uses his dying words of “with great power comes great responsibility” as his guiding mantra as he learns what it means to be Spider-Man. Then we saw the same thing ten years later with Andrew Garfield’s first outing as Spider-Man in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man.

These movies were all very successful at the box office. Therefore, studios take the wrong lesson away. Studios think that audiences want to see how heroes become heroes. So, a superhero’s first outing is going to be how they took on their hero calling. This trend then started bleeding out of the superhero genre into movies in general. If a movie hero didn’t have an origin story already told, then Hollywood would be sure to create one.

Some of our best heroes needed no introduction. While Indiana Jones’ origin story was shown in The Last Crusade, audiences were introduced to a hero in his prime at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The story was compelling enough without knowing how Indy got the scar on his lip, the bullwhip, the fedora, or the desire to be an archeologist that recovered valuable artifacts for museums. He was just that, Indiana Jones. Same thing with Han Solo. We get introduced to him as a scoundrel in a bar talking big about his ship who shoots first and asks no questions, but is also a bit reckless, impulsive, and gets into trouble with the authority figures. While 2018’s Solo was a fun movie, it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know about who Han Solo was, and it cheapened some of the mystique around the character first introduced in 1977.

With today’s mass of superhero media, it’s almost exhausting to know every first appearance of a new hero will be showing how they become who they’re meant to be. In many cases, a hero’s second outing is much more compelling than their first. They understand who they’re meant to be, but have them embraced it yet? Or rather, if they have embraced it wholeheartedly, what happens when they go up against someone who challenges that reason for being or philosophy in a way that makes them a serious threat? Instead, genuinely interesting storytelling avenues are foregone for origin stories which nobody asked for.

What makes matters worse is that sometimes, if there was no origin story told before, somebody would come up with one as a way to sell their production. Even villains are not adverse to the treatment, with Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians. Therein hits upon another issue with origin stories in that they can muddy a character’s original intention. Cruella in the original movie wanted to kill and skin dogs to make a coat because she was a Cruel Devil (clue’s in the name). Making her some downtrodden victim undercuts how big of a psychotic break she had to have had in order to become the monster wanting to murder dogs so she could be more fashionable. This will get touched upon later, because it represents a problem with the lack of original stories when they could be good if not saddled with other baggage. Furthermore, making every hero have a checkered past or every villain have a sympathetic backstory can undercut their actions in the ‘present’ of the narratives.

2022’s The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, averted the origin story problem in spectacular fashion by doing a great fakeout at the beginning and then dropping audiences into a Gotham where Batman has been doing his thing for a year. This movie’s Batman was about understanding that he cannot be only Batman, nor does Batman exist as just a force of vengeance against Gotham’s criminals. It speaks to an older style of filmmaking where heroes and villains can exist for their respective reasons and did not need deep delves into their pasts or psychologies in order to understand or justify why they did what they did. Even if, in that movie, Riddler’s motivations and psychology were a major motivation for his character and the plot, the movie felt centered around Bruce Wayne exploring how he chose to be a hero rather than why.

The Batman sidestepped the problem with legacy heroes by making a new iteration. In the same way as James Bond, Batman frequently casts a new Batman to tell new stories with a familiar but different character. It avoids the problems of a legacy sequel.

Legacy Heroes

The Legacy Sequel has become a much more popular tool in recent years. Star Wars, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, and so on have all seen new entries many years or even decades after their most recent installments. It gives the audience some nostalgia, and if done right, allows people to see a hero they have an emotional attachment get one last adventure in before the actor is too old to make these movies. It also can make some poignant commentary on the passage of time, because movies are immortal. A character is frozen in time when they first played the character, which is why Humphrey Bogart is always the same age in Casablanca as he was when the movie was shot, even though he’s dead now. And there was a time in Hollywood where nobody would have thought about bringing back Rick Blaine for further adventures. Not everything needed to be a franchise, not every part of a given story needed to be told. We didn’t need to see Rick Blaine: The War Years, or Rick and Ilsa in Paris or whatever inane stories would have been told. And we certainly didn’t need to see Rick finding Ilsa after twenty years to have to say goodbye to her again because all of the development he got in the first movie got thrown out the window.

The greatest problem with so many of these legacy sequels is that the heroes are often brought down so low again after their rise to their heights in the original work(s). Point blank, it’s creatively bankrupt and exceptionally lazy to make the heroes depressed or failures when there comes a time to use them again. It’s a cheap way to make them retread all of the lessons they learned in the first place and is seldom gratifying for the audience, watching someone come to embrace their role in the world in 2018 the same way we watched them do it in 1987, and again in 1993, and so on and so forth.

Star Wars may be one of the worst offenders. At the beginning of the sequel trilogy, Leia was a disgraced former Senator running an off the books private military estranged from Han who returned to smuggling, and Luke was a failed Jedi Master in exile. These positions were dramatic falls from where they ended up at the end of Return of the Jedi, and allowing the Empire to regroup and become as powerful as it became as the First Order. Not only does this block the characters from growing in any NEW ways, but it also railroads all storytelling. After the fall of the Empire, the New Republic must absolutely be inept and ineffective in order to facilitate the rise of the First Order on the galaxy’s edge.

Not only does hitting the reset button invalidate all the hard work of the characters, but it cuts off the potentials for storytelling. The Sequel Trilogy became a rehash of the Original Trilogy for no other reason than nostalgia. Indiana Jones suffered from much the same fate. Heroes of stories such as these do not always need to have this incredible journey. Indiana Jones deserved to have started The Dial of Destiny where the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull left him off. The call back to adventure should be something other than “he feels old and his life is depressing.” It’s frankly creative bankruptcy to regress characters to an earlier point in their journey to make them have an ‘arc’ across a film that’s merely retreading ground they traversed once before.

It’s very hard to land a legacy sequel in a way that pleases audiences while simultaneously doing justice to the characters and their stories. It’s far more common that movie studios would rather play into fanservice to give audiences what they want on a surface level than commit to high art, especially now. “Nostalgia above all” has become a guiding principle in the creation and marketing of these legacy sequels.

There are big budget exceptions. Top Gun: Maverick had an impossible task of following up one of the most beloved 80s movies after 36 years. The original Top Gun was more style than substance, and became beloved for breaking ground with the way aviation was shot in film. By committing to pushing limits again with the sequel, Maverick gave the sequel the sense of authenticity that it lacked. Furthermore, it was written in such a way that honored the time that had passed for the characters and the actors without compromising the journeys they had gone through previously. The argument could be made that Maverick had an emotional core which the original lacked, making it the superior film.

Maverick is a case study in how to do a blockbuster legacy sequel right: double down on the principles that made the original stand out in fresh ways (a bit oxymoronic) while honoring the characters and their journeys. Maverick avoided one of the other pitfalls of Hollywood today by not trying to make a deconstruction of something people love for the sake of it.

Deserting the Deconstruction

Superhero comics, films, shows, and games traditionally have an optimistic view of heroes. They are meant to give us hope. In recent years, their impact has been dulled by the trend of grounded adaptations, gritty reboots, and deconstructions. That trend has bled over into stories as a whole, influenced by the post-9/11 America. The general paranoia and distrust of authority figures in the wake of America’s darkest moment in the 21^st century led to a general air of cynicism.

In contrast to the traditional view of superheroes, franchises such as Watchmen, The Boys, Invincible, and others give the impression that superheroes are irresponsible, selfish, or crazy. That they disdain the normal people for not having powers and that allows them to act as evil or immoral as they want with few repercussions. They make compelling watching and reading, but they run the risk of overshadowing the message. Kids should idolize Superman because of his genuine desire to be good, not the maniacal power fantasy of Homelander. Superman isn’t great because he can end most fights with one punch, he’s great because he literally wants to use everything else he has in hopes he never has to throw that punch.

2025 was a good year for optimistic superhero fare. Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman both served as hopeful summer blockbusters which gave the heroes heart, spirit, and a desire to good. At their core they are hopeful. They’d be followed by the fall’s release of Dispatch. In all of these stories, heroes are good people trying their best and are facing struggles against that. Dispatch is unique amongst these three in that it surrounded a group of supervillains attempting to reform and become heroes on their own terms, which is why they fit into this optimistic category.

Superheroes are meant to tell people that even the best among us struggle, but it’s worth it to keep doing the right thing because it ultimately makes the world a better place.  That isn’t to say adaptations of the comics need to have the “aw shucks” Leave it to Beaver sensibilities of the Golden Age of Comics. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Daredevil both dealt with dark subject matters, but at their core, they have messages of hope. The core message of Fantastic Four was that it takes everyone working together, both within the team but society at large. The message of Superman is that our humanity is what makes us strong. The message of Dispatch is that while redemption is hard, it’s still worth trying.

In the 2000s era of gritty darkness with all things having held on for the last couple of decades, the idea that heroes can be heroes straight up is ironically more of a fresh take. In an era where the anti-hero seems to be more of the standard, the portrayal of someone trying to be good just because it’s the right thing to do is incredibly fresh.  

Originality is more of what Hollywood needs.

Lack of Originality

All of these pitfalls that Hollywood has fallen prey to in the superhero era are a result of trend chasing and a lack of originality. The superhero genre became such a massive moneymaker because of the MCU’s success that it influenced the entirety of the movie industry. The rise of streaming helped secure the blockbuster as the only product worth focusing on, consigning the mid-budget flick to streaming hell where it is lost amongst all of the other similar films. With the blockbuster’s place of prominence, there came a massive need to make sure each film delivered significant returns on the initial investments, and with budgets rising and audiences less likely to see movies in the theater, the ones they do see needed to be guaranteed hits. To that end, studios stopped taking as many risks, and started following the leader.

Hollywood being derivative is not a new critique. It’s really just not. But it’s a real one. How many ideas have been shackled by being shoehorned into an existing franchise. Take the earlier mentioned Cruella. What a brilliant movie could have been made out of a fashion designer trying to make it big, and finding out the uncomfortable truth about her own parentage and wanting revenge on the fashion world after being spurned this way and that. Imagine what ideas could come in if you didn’t have to try and fit it into a story with expectations people have been holding onto since the 1960s. Removing an interesting idea from familiarity means that you have so much more room to play, expand, and grow with it.

Hollywood is falling prey to the same types of problems that doomed the studio system and led to the downfall of the Hays Code. So many stories brought to the screen today are taking the wrong lessons away from the MCU or superhero films in general. People resonate with hope because hope is a constant throughout human history. People want to see fresh, new stories that become something incredible on their own.

The best way to see the change in filmmaking and usher in the new New Hollywood era is to support new movies. Movies that take risks are often better because they’re executed with vision. Art often loses to commerce but it doesn’t have to. The trend-chasing of the film industry today is only a reaction to what audiences are willing to spend money on.