Whatever Happened to the Men of Tomorrow?

June 2023. The Flash sprints and crashes onto screen, managing to become Warner Brothers’ biggest financial disaster with a projected loss of up to 200 million dollars—not to mention the film’s troubled production, cycling through 45 writers and a dozen different directors, as well as the film’s even more troubled star. Yet despite all these things, The Flash’s spectacular failure doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We’re seeing repeated superhero box office disappointments, from Blue Beetle to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, franchises that used to be surefire hits continue to flop. Whatever happened to the golden age of superhero movies? For all intents and purposes, it seems like the superhero is going in the way of the Western, with oversaturation handing it a slow and painful death. In a desperate bid to breathe life into the crumbling DC empire, Warner Bros. has recruited Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn to reboot the DC universe. Now the question becomes: How can James Gunn and Superman: Legacy prevent the superhero from joining the cowboy’s fate?

Perhaps The Flash can be a starting point to consider where not to turn. Despite its substantial box office failure, one of its bigger offenses is its lack of love and respect for the Scarlet Speedster or for DC itself. It’s a movie that buckles under its own weight, crushed by the expectations of being a time travel spectacle. The film is overstacked—on top of Barry Allen (The Flash) racing to stop a villain from 10 years ago of 2013’s Man of Steel, on top of being a multiverse movie with Michael Keaton’s Batman and Sasha Calle’s Supergirl, on top of filling itself to the brim with dead actors puppeteered by deep fakes and CGI, on top of setting up a new DC universe, oh, and with occasional flashes of a personal story about Barry reuniting with his death mother— the film is all but a blur. This is all to say that The Flash isn't a movie in the eyes of the Warner Bros conglomerate, but rather a product with checklists meant to set up more new products. Yet in the excess of cameos (like a CG misshapen Nicolas Cage returning as Superman in a reference maybe 10 people will understand), movies like The Flash have lost audiences. Viewers no longer worship the superhero.

This doesn't mean the superhero well has evaporated entirely. With sparks of success in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there’s still a little gas left in the tank. It’s just a matter of getting audiences to care again. Gone are the days of simply slapping a Marvel logo on a movie and raking in cash. With COVID-19 and audiences beginning to be drawn in by fresh films like Oppenheimer and Barbie, they’re more selective about what they go to see. There’s less space for the Blue Beetles and Shang-Chis of the world. So what’s the solution? How could James Gunn bring back the Man of Tomorrow? Is it possible to rebuild the DC universe in a cultural climate like this one?

The answer might be a lot simpler than it sounds and hardly profound. It isn’t about making things more comic-accurate or appealing to comic book fans specifically. The problem isn’t that fans aren’t showing up to the theater—in fact, they’re the only ones showing up. Rather, the cinematic approach of using movies to launch new movies with the promise of familiar characters in the source material is no longer sustainable in the long run. Kit Harrington as the Black Knight isn’t going to bring in general audiences anytime soon.

There’s a reason the new Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy movies did so well. The reason? They’re just movies. Nothing more, nothing less. The notion of a cinematic universe isn’t their driving force. They merely augment certain parts of it. As they are, the movies act as meditations on human emotions, exploring feelings like grief and belonging. They treat their characters with respect, not as spectacles to be dangled in front of audiences like a shiny object. As the first movie in a new emerging cinematic universe, it can be easy to want Superman: Legacy to be everything, to create a new idea of the Man of Steel, to set up sequels for years to come, to revive a dying franchise. It’s hard to think of any movie in the past 10 years that has had so much pressure on it, but that’s probably the wrong way to think about it. If James Gunn wants to revitalize the superhero, all Superman: Legacy has to be about is Superman. Who knows, maybe Scorsese will think it's cinema.