A year without superheroes: has Covid broken our obsession?
Doesn’t it feel like a lifetime ago that Marvel’s Avengers said their goodbyes, having saved the world for good this time? Didn’t last long, did it? No sooner was Thanos vanquished than along came a new, invisible mega-villain to crush humanity, and this time hightech flying suits and big magic hammers were useless against it.
Thanks to Covid, after a decade of comic-book movies dominating the movie landscape, we have had almost a whole year without them. There have been a few – Birds of Prey, X-Men spinoff The New Mutants – but for the most part 2020 has been a superhero sabbatical, marked by postponements and delays. Reinforcements are on their way. Arriving into whatever cinemas are open this December (and streaming elsewhere) comes the sequel Wonder Woman 1984, a full year after its first planned release date.
Plenty more will follow in the next 12 months, as all the delayed superhero movies of 2020 finally reach the cinemas, but have our ideas of heroism changed in the interim? Offscreen, 2020’s real heroes have been healthcare workers, vaccine scientists and
activists. In place of Captain America we have had the 100-year-old Captain Tom walking around his garden. On the small screen, we have admired everyone from chess geniuses (The Queen’s Gambit) to 70s feminists (Mrs America), confused black Londoners (I May Destroy You) to big-cat enthusiasts ( Tiger King). The only superheroes around have been evil (The Boys).
So when cinema renews its offer of fantastical people in costumes beating the crap out of each other, will we still be buying? Or will it feel like a relic from a bygone era? The sociological factors behind these movies’ supremacy in the 2010s – empowerment fantasy? moral simplicity? pure escapism? – might no longer apply. If they do, something else may be changing. Marvel’s expertly plotted Avengers saga consistently left its arch-rivals DC looking flat footed, but many of its brand-name breadwinners have now retired (Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, Chris Evans’s Captain America). Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death also puts Black Panther in a bind. Planned 2021 releases Black Widow and Spider-Man 3 feel a bit like reheated leftovers, and new titles such as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Eternals, are unknown quantities.
By contrast, lined up after Wonder Woman, DC has The Suicide Squad (directed by Marvel defector James Gunn), followed in 2022 by Robert Pattinson’s buzzed-about The Batman. So it could be a changing of the guard. Post-Covid, superhero movies might feel like comfort viewing, in which case Wonder Woman 1984’s retro vibes should hit all the right buttons. But it is equally possible, after all we’ve been through this year, that the spell has broken. In which case, Avengers really was the endgame.