Superhero movies and shows are becoming homework, and it could kill them
And then there’s the fragmentation of the titles themselves. Right now, Spider-Man comes in Amazing, Ultimate, Astonishing, All-New-All-Different, 2099, and plain-old Spider-Man varieties. Over the years, Spider-Man has been Spectacular, Unlimited, Untold, Friendly, Superior, and Giant-Sized. Some of these are part of the main continuity and some not. If you’re not having a mild panic attack yet, you’re probably a comic-book fan. X-Men, Batman, the Justice League, Iron Man and the Avengers are all guilty of this to some degree — a splintering of the lineup as a way to milk that much more attention and money from a title as the overall audience for comics dwindles.
This stuff gets complicated and confusing, and it becomes off-putting even to many committed fans.
Think of comic books – get your pitchforks ready – like soap operas with extremely high stakes. Complete with evil twins, love triangles, attractive people in sexy outfits, and everything else.
While this is indeed a problem in comic books, though, both of the major players, Marvel and DC, have an answer to this: a continuity reset. Sometimes it’s a massive success, sometimes it crashes and burns, but in the end it brings things back to some manner of basics.
One of the very first of these was DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, a 12-issue mini-series meant to do away with the multiverse that helped make things so complicated. By the end, Supergirl and The Flash (the Barry Allen version) had both died trying to save everyone. And decades of conflicting powers, origins, and histories were wiped clean, giving the artists at DC carte blanche to work on characters from near-scratch.
This is something all these shows and movies are going to have to figure out eventually, but the concept is rife with problems in a live-action universe that make it harder to pull off without confusing or putting the viewer off in some way.
Live-action movies and television shows are not strangers to reboots, remakes, and rehashes, but these items are rarely connected to each other by anything other than the the Tommy Westphall Unified Television Universe Theory. The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow are all intimately tied together, as are Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist.
In comic books, there’s more of an inherent sense that the universe is plastic. Artists change all the time. Some artists’ runs are more beloved than others, but generally speaking no one bats an eye when artists swap out in a given book. As long as the super hero’s name is preceded by the right adjective, the story goes on uninterrupted for both the character and the readers.
Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together
Now, imagine that same question with Iron Man or Thor. Or, more appropriately, Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth. These characters and their actors are, for millions and millions of people, intimately linked, as is the look and feel of that universe. If Hemsworth gets tired of playing the role of Norse God, if the story demands they swap him out, if he ages out, then what happens? Audiences are attached to not just the character, but the actor, too. And you don’t have to pay Captain America in anything other than imaginary army buxx. But Chris Evans makes real money and demands commensurate pay to match his influence.
If you swapped in another actor in place of the one sitting in the spot, it gets confusing to viewers. Spider-Man has seen three actors now sit in his role, but chances are good that Tom Holland will see himself linked to that role for the foreseeable future because he is now part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Swapping out Batman was a simple matter before, as well. We’ve had as many Batmen as we have James Bonds.
Now that Ben Affleck is tied to the character as a part of the DCEU, though, swapping him out is going to be much tougher. And if WB and DC won’t budge on giving him artistic license with the character and his standalone film, they might find themselves doing that sooner rather than later. But imagine if suddenly Josh Brolin or Michael Fassbender were standing in place of Affleck while Henry Cavill and Gal Godot were still Superman and Wonder Woman. The mask helps, but there’s a cognitive dissonance there. It’s like changing Batman from one art style to another while the other characters are drawn as they have been. For casual viewers, it could be confusing. For invested viewers, it could be downright off-putting.
This doesn’t even factor in the idea of a character death resetting between movies as part of a continuity reset. My head is starting to hurt.
When, not If
Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/04/23/superhero-movies-shows-continuity-homework/