Are People Getting Tired of Super Hero Movies?

With the recent release of Marvel Studios newest movie, “Doctor Strange,” that marks the 14^th movie in the official Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). According to Marvel Studios plan they will release three more movies in 2017, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and “Thor: Ragnarok.” This is a lot of superhero movies and this doesn’t even count the DC, X-Men, and all of the other Marvel movies not part of the official MCU. With all of these superhero moves being released every year, are people really going to still be interested?

Back in the ’90s people always thought superhero movies were supposed to be cheesy and campy. It wasn’t till the early 2000s when the Spider Man and X-Men movies started coming out that people started to realize that superhero movies can be serious, have a sense of humor, and have a good story just like other movies.

The super hero genre got an amazing boost in popularity in 2008 with the release of the first MCU movie; “Iron Man.” “Iron Man” showed the world that huge-budget hero movies with big name actors could work. It made over $580 million and turned the main character, Tony Stark, a charismatic, womanizing, tin-man into a house hold name. It also popularized the trend of having a short scene after the movie’s credits that help set up the next movie in the series.

While the idea of sequels is nothing new to people, having a long chain of movie take place in the same universe was never really tired until the MCU was created, but could such an idea really work? Would your average moviegoer really care enough to see 14 separate movies just to get the full story? Well according to their box office sales every single MCU movie has made huge amounts of money. The lowest grossing movie, “The Incredible Hulk,” still made over $135 million. Three of those movies, “Avengers,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and “Iron Man 3,”  are even in the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time.

Super hero movies are Hollywood’s current fad, but just like all fads it will eventually go out of style. Western movies are a good example of this. They were the dominating genera from the early 1900s to about the 1950s. There were so many westerns by that point that everybody got tired of them. The same thing will probably happen to super hero movies, just not for a while.

While only more popular super hero’s got their own movies at first, Marvel Studios took a chance and made a few focuses on more obscure heroes such as “Ant Man”, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, and “Dr. Strange”. The average person would know almost nothing about these characters but they still exploded at the box office, with “Guardians of the Galaxy” being one of the highest grossing movies in the series. That’s proof that the genre is still going strong.

With Marvel and DC’s plans to pump out multiple movies a year the superhero genre will stay main stream for at least a while longer. The people that are fans of the comics or invested into the story lines will continue see them for their favorite characters, while the casual viewer will go to watch super-powered beings blow stuff up across the universe in a high budget action movie. Superhero movies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.