The End of the Superhero Boom

Plus: an underappreciated new Coen Brother movie.

Actors Rachel Brosnahan and David Corenswet with director James Gunn in a promotional picture for Superman. (Courtesy James Gunn/DC via MovieStillsDB)

If someone asked me for a two-sentence summary of the last decade of Hollywood, it might go something like this:

Over a six-month period in 2018 and 2019, Aquaman and Captain Marvel—feature films about C-tier superheroes—grossed roughly $2.3 billion worldwide, combined. Five years later, the far-more-expensive sequels to those two films would again release within months of each other and combine to gross roughly $1.6 billion less than their predecessors, worldwide.

2025 will be the first year since 2011 in which no movie based on a comic book grossed more than $700 million worldwide. Superman just barely cracked $600 million, or roughly the same amount as the Brad Pitt racing car movie F1. Even though four of the ten highest-grossing movies of the year, domestically, are currently superhero movies, the bubble has pretty decisively popped.

This isn’t to say that such movies can’t make money—if you can’t figure out how to make budgets work for a genre of film that’s still routinely generating between $400 and $600 million at the box office, you should probably find new work—but the era of superhero dominance is over. You’ll still see the occasional billion-dollar hit on something like a Spider-Man or a Deadpool or maybe that new Avengers cycle of films with Robert Downey Jr. playing Doctor Doom for some reason, but the days when Captain Marvel and Aquaman are going to make you ten figures at the worldwide box office are over.

This is probably for the best. The question is what comes next, and I’m not sure anyone has a good answer to that. Our friends at the Ankler report spec script sales are through the roof, and that’s great: more spec scripts means more original movies, which means more potential hits like Sinners and Weapons and a greater diversity of films designed to appeal to folks who have, somewhat accurately, seen the multiplex as the place you go to for large-scale superhero fare and not much else. But the industry (and the theaters themselves) will be hard-pressed to replace the box office of these films with smaller, more nimble fare. Here’s hoping that studio heads have a good nose for new filmmakers and new ideas—and that audiences give them a chance.

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Caught Stealing review

Austin Butler and his feline friend in Caught Stealing. (Courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing, via MovieStillsDB)

I feel like Darren Aronofsky has become the least-appreciated of the late-’90s, early-’00s young auteurs. I understand not liking The Whale or Mother!, but the man made Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, so he gets a pass from me.¹ Anyway, his new one is Caught Stealing, and it shares a lot of the compulsions present in his best work. Here’s an excerpt of my review:

I don’t want to be overly dour here, and shall interrupt the sermon to confirm that Caught Stealing is probably the most-fun movie Aronofsky’s ever made, excepting possibly the camp delights of Black Swan. It’s not quite a lark and Charlie Huston’s script (adapted from his own 2004 novel of the same name) puts the black in black comedy, for sure. But Butler is a fantastically physical comedian, throwing himself around the streets and alleys and fire escapes of New York City with abandon, doing pratfalls off barstools and pool tables and whatever else. And there’s a fine comic timing to the editing beats in this movie, as when we smash cut to Hank, nude, in an old Hasidic woman’s home, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) looming over him, the two finally believing his claims that he does not have the thing they’re looking for.

That said, there is a depth to Caught Stealing that reveals itself over the course of the film, in part via Hank’s degradation and in part through the repeated flashes to a recurring nightmare he has, the dream he snaps awake from every night, a scream stifled in his throat. It’s a movie about a man suffering, a man in need of an absolution that can only come through self-control.

And that—even that mere sliver of a possibility that things could get better—is a rare commodity indeed in Darren Aronofsky’s moral universe.

Full review here.

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Fun episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week, as I talked to Alamo Drafthouse cofounder Tim League about how the movie-theater business has evolved and discussed his new concept: think high-end, Michelin-caliber food served in a private screening room where you get to pick the movie projected on the big screen and kick-ass sound system. To paraphrase one of my favorite movies: Is this heaven? No, it’s Metro Private Cinema.

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On Across the Movie Aisle this week, we dove into the retrofuturistic xenomorph adventure, Alien: Earth, the new series on Hulu from the creator of the Fargo TV show. Peter and I liked it, though Alyssa was a little harder to impress. Mixed review this week!

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Mini-Review: Honey Don’t (Theaters)

Margaret Qualley in Honey Don’t! (Courtesy Focus Features, via MovieStillsDB)

I’m a little surprised by some of the outright hostility I’ve seen aimed at Honey Don’t!, the latest film from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. This is a ninety-minute original drama aimed at adults that is unapologetically sexy and idiosyncratic. It’s not perfect—it feels as though a subplot connecting the initial murder to the crimes committed by the perpetrator either never got written by the duo or was shot and hit the cutting room floor—but it’s funny, clever, well-acted, and genuinely subverts the expectations of audiences in a way that made my eyebrows arch in appreciation.

The opening sequence sets up the mystery: There’s a woman, dead in a car. An accident on a tight highway turn? Unlikely: Another woman approaches the vehicle and takes a piece of jewelry off the girl, then drives away on her sporty little moped before indulging in some skinny dipping. The dead girl was a prospective client of Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a P.I. in Bakersfield, California, who now feels . . . well, not duty-bound, precisely, but mildly interested in figuring out why the girl might have wanted to employ her and who got her killed.

All signs point to Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans) and his Four-Way Temple, which mostly seems to serve as a place for him to engage in, ah, fellowship with his female parishioners and run drugs for a French syndicate, embodied by the mysterious bob-cut–coiffed moped enthusiast from earlier. Will O’Donahue be able to figure out the deceased’s connection to the church with the aid of police detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day) and evidence room clerk MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza)? Or is something else in play here?

The plotting is both shaggy and kind of dense; it is, like Coen’s The Big Lebowski, the sort of movie that will likely reveal its intricacies are less haphazard on second viewing. As I said, I don’t think you can chalk all of the messiness up to red herrings misleading the audience—it really does feel like there’s a missing subplot, though I don’t want to spoil precisely what it is that’s missing—but I’m willing to overlook it because Qualley is just so damn charming as the Sam Spade of San Joaquin Valley. She just has the perfect voice for hard-bitten dialogue and the perfect physicality for a slinking, lanky gumshoe. There’s also a perfectly pitched level of comic brutality in this movie that is sometimes lacking from similar fare: the violence is often funny and ugly in a way that doesn’t minimize its callousness.

Again: Not a perfect film, but one that’s stronger than its 40-something-percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe. I strongly recommend giving it a shot this weekend if you’ve got nothing else to do. And if you don’t dig it? Well, it’s only ninety minutes long. You’d likely have wasted them anyway. (Lord knows I would’ve.)

1. The Fountain has its supporters, but the movie has always fallen squarely into “interesting failure” territory for me. That said, Noah is inarguably the most fascinating big-budget blockbuster of the 2010s, and I will drown on that hill.