COMIC BOOK MOVIES

When, in the space of three months, all three movies in a genre arrive with very public news that they are not the movies they could have been, something has gone wrong. There is, I think, an increasing sense that every mark the comic-book genre is forced to hit — origin stories, Easter eggs, big-picture continuity, action beats, fan service, world-stakes battles, potential sequels, post-credit sequences — is obstructing them from being movies. It certainly seems to be keeping their makers (“architects” feels like a more accurate term than “creators”) from any sense of joy — directorial joy, cinematic joy, authorial joy, or even the obsessional joy that allowed Peter Jackson to commit himself to living in Middle-earth for 15 years or that has sent James Cameron off to whatever solar system in which he is currently purporting to make Avatar sequels. These comic-book movies are, first and foremost, assignments. Directors and writers try to get through them with their souls and spirits intact. They pat themselves down afterward, the way you do when you get off a roller coaster, to see if they’re still all there. Some end up less all there than others.

Sometime between the openings of Ant-Man and Fantastic Four, 20th Century Fox released the red-band trailer for Deadpool to great mirth from what is known — whether in comic-book or political circles — as “the base,” the element that must always be appeased, sometimes at the self-defeating expense of broader appeal. As of this writing, the 2 — and what viewers have seen is a successfully sour in-joke that takes a rather vigorous dump on this whole enterprise. It stars Ryan Reynolds, who, if things had gone according to plan, would now be in negotiations for $20 million plus a piece of the back end on Green Lantern 4 but instead has gotten a second shot at the genre, this time as an air-quotes superhero who kills people and says, “Please don’t make the supersuit green! Or animated!” That’s funny, but it’s what is known in theater as an expensive laugh. Jokes that say “This is all ********” tend to make an audience feel slightly skeptical the next time you try to convince them that no, it isn’t.
The Deadpool trailer is fun, and if you’re a glass-half-full person, you might say that it’s proof that the genre is sturdy and entrenched enough to withstand a poke in the ribs. If, however, you are glass-half-empty, you might cite the trailer as evidence that impatience with the comic-book genre and its tropes has now become a real enough part of the discourse to make it out of Comic-Con conversations and chat-board rants and into the content of the actual movies. When a genre starts saying enough already about itself — and when it says that on the eve of five more years ofmovies — I wouldn’t say it’s time to worry, but perhaps it’s time to wonder.