I was just watching a YouTube video about superhero movies that haven’t aged well. And it made we wonder if the currently popular movies in the genre will suffer the same fate.
Twenty years from now, will people still think Infinity War and Endgame are good? Or will the special effects business continue to advance and end up making these 2018 effects look cheesy? Will the plots and characters become cliched? Will the franchise eventually run out of ideas and become known for bad movies that will ruin the memories of the early ones?
Or will these be the kind of movies that hold up even when they get older?
Sounds about right to me. They were informed by a post-9-11 sensibility that, I very much hope, will fade into the past and eventually might seem almost quaint.
I was at a Star Trek convention many years ago and heard Leonard Nimoy say, “The episodes we did thirty years ago that were good are still good today. The ones that were bad thirty years ago are still bad today.” I think he was right. But the original Star Trek series was dated when I first started watching it in the early 80s let alone by the time I heard Nimoy speak in the late 90s. I think people will still look back and consider most of the MCU movies good but they’ll be dated.
I’d personally add Captain America: The First Avenger to the list of great Marvel movies. I also think it’s probably one of the ones that will age the best, since it was already set decades in the past, so it’s a lot less of-its-time than the others.
I rewatched all of them recently for the third/second time recently (except Hulk which is not available on Disney+ for some reason). The third time through First Avenger, I noticed some parts were a little bad in retrospect. Not movie-ruining, but cliche heavy and dated. The second Captain America movie is one that I think will hold up.
I’ve seen the DC movies considered to be the good ones and think those will not hold up as well.
It helps that to a certain level, they’re designed to be timeless. Few pop-culture references, absolutely *no *contemporary music…but besides that, other than the special effects, they’re very traditionally-made films. The directing, staging and story structure aren’t that much different than, say, the Indiana Jones films. Or Star Wars, for that matter.
Hulk is not Disney property, but Universal (I think). So they can only use him in movies, but not make a new Hulk movie… which is actually working out fairly well.
Some of the movies will hold up well but I think the Avengers movies after the first one will not stand the test of time at all.
Ultron, Civil War, Infinity war and Endgame, all bloated messes that had enough spectacle to make for a solid cinema experience but don’t really hold up to any level of scrutiny.
Which is also the situation with Namor/Sub-Mariner now. His copyright situation keeps him from being in a solo movie, but he’s rumored to be appearing soon, possibly as the Big Bad of the next Black Panther film, or the next Doctor Strange.
I think a factor is that a completed series never feels the same as it did to the people who lived through its release. Those of us who walked out of the theater after watching Infinity War and then had to wait a year to see Endgame experienced the story in a different way than some theoretical future viewer will. That future viewer will be aware of the story as a whole, even if they haven’t watched the movies.
It’s like the big reveal in The Empire Strikes Back. I saw it back in 1980 and I remember it was a big deal. But I doubt anyone is surprised by it now. Not only do they know it when they start watching the movie, they know it when they start watching Star Wars. No modern viewer is going to experience that moment of shock.
I overheard my son the other day who I guess you could say grew up on the MCU movies (saw Avengers in the theater when he was 6 and all the other MCU movies as they came out) talking to his fellow 14 year-old friend on facetime saying he just recently tried to watch Avengers on Disney+ and found it “kind of boring”.
I’d say that with all movies, whether they hold up or not has more to do with quality than anything else. With superhero movies, since special effects are such a critical part, it still plays a secondary role to the movie as a whole.
Take the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. For starters, let’s all agree that Superman 2 (1980) is far superior to the first one (1978) and though they show their age in any number of ways, they still represent good quality storytelling. Supermans III -the one with Richard Pryor and IV: The Quest for Peace are undeniable turds that no amount of polishing could ever fix.
The fight scenes from Superman IV are so bad with horrible special effects and genuine WTF moments that they cross over to the so-bad–they’re-good threshold. I can’t imagine they had an eye on future generations when putting this crap together.
Dunno. They will for me. I could watch Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Infinity War and Endgame over and over. And have, with the current situation.