Marvel

It is a depressing statement on the banality of the film industry that the death of actor William Hurt, at the age of seventy-one, was marked by at least one obituary stating, “Avengers star dies.” Hurt, who appeared in several Marvel films as the military character Thaddeus Ross in his latter-day career, did indeed appear in the mega-grossing Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame, and I very much hope that he received some tiny portion of the films’ enormous box office receipts in recognition of his appearance. But to describe Hurt’s life and work as defined by his Marvel roles reminded me of the great Alan Bennett line about his sexuality: “It’s like asking a man who has just crossed the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Evian water.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally. But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

One of the few upsides to the pandemic’s peak last year was that no Marvel films were released in theaters. We’ve suffered for it this year, with the arrival in close succession of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and, now, Eternals. But it was glorious to have a period of nearly two years without the deadening, soul-destroying presence of Kevin Feige’s Riefenstahlian masterplan deafening audiences in our multiplexes, and, increasingly, at home on our televisions. But the brief respite is over. Over the next eighteen months, no fewer than seven Marvel films will fight, bite, and kick their way onto our screens, in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The teaser for Spider-Man: No Way Home, out this Christmas, which had a record number of 355 million views in the first 24 hours of online availability, delivers three minutes of thrills. Tom Holland is back, in the titular role, with his girlfriend from the previous Spidey movie, his best friend Ned, references to Mysterion, jokes from Benedict Cumberbatch as master wizard Dr Strange, plus engagement with that most playful of Marvel concepts, the multiverse. Bring in the multiverse, and anything, everything, is possible. Are you old enough to recall that moment in Dallas when the shooting of JR was revealed to be a dream? Well, the multiverse does all that, and some. Time is not a constant.

C’mon, guys: you know how Natasha Romanoff feels about having red in her ledger. Marvel's long-awaited Black Widow movie finally arrived in theaters in July. But the excitement of the release has been sullied by bad blood — and bad debts. Scarlett Johansson, who gave 10 years of her life to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Avengers saga before getting a film of her own, sued Disney for breach of contract after they released Black Widow in the ‘Premier Access’ category on the Disney+ streaming service on the same day it hit theaters. According to Johansson and her reps, her Black Widow contract guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of 'Other' deprived of its disturbing Otherness. We should add to this series another key figure from our cultural space: a decaffeinated protester, a protester who says all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge.

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer boredom, I was tempted back by the fact that this one stars a lady (Scarlett Johansson) and another lady (Florence Pugh) and even a third lady (Rachel Weisz) and is directed by a lady (Cate Shortland). Could be wonderful, I thought, except it isn’t. More women is its only decent idea. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. Otherwise, it’s all formulaic bish-bosh, smash-crash action scenes broken up by lame jokes and lame philosophising along the lines of: ‘Your pain only makes you stronger.’ Not if you’re dying in hospital and they’ve run out of morphine, I was minded to shout at the screen.

Mark Millar has a raging hangover but he couldn’t be more chirpy or enthusiastic. ‘People say they get worse as you get older but I get reverse hangovers where I feel amazing. I wake up at four or five and I’m ready to go!’ I’ve caught him on a Sunday morning, on his way to Mass, after an exhausting three weeks in which he has been doing up to 45 interviews a day to promote Jupiter’s Legacy, his blockbuster superhero series for Netflix. He ought to be nervous: this is his first big project off the blocks since (in 2017) the studio bought up his publishing company Millarworld for a reported $50-100 million. Instead, as ever, he’s fizzing with energy, enthusiasm and optimism. The reason, he explains, is that he was born with a kind of superpower.

Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series Sandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töppfer. Did Mr Töppfer realise what he was doing when he one day decided to draw a narrative in sequential panels with captions underneath? His satirical novel in pictures, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, was published in 1837, and made its way to America five years later as The Adventures of Mr Obadiah Oldbuck. ‘Mr Oldbuck drinks ass’s milk’ reads one caption, and then overleaf: ‘His physician recommending exercise, he buys an Arabian courser.’ Riding the courser, ‘Mr Oldbuck increases his speed, advancing at the rate of ten leagues an hour.

A few days ago, with somewhat bittersweet timing, Marvel Entertainment made an exciting announcement. This was at a time when low information people — up to and including the president — were realizing that, uhh, hey Chuck, this virus thingy might be quite a big deal. Might be a good time to stock up on rice and beans, you know? Back to Marvel’s announcement. They were creating a new generation of heroes for a grateful populace! Their names you ask? Well, there was Screentime, a ‘meme-obsessed super teen’ who has the ability to use Google without a WiFi connection. There was Snowflake (they/them) and Safespace; the former throws psychic snowflake shurikens at people who read Breitbart and the latter generates a pink force shield around them as they do so.

Only in retrospect does 1999 appear to be the last imaginative year of mainstream American cinema. From Cruel Intentions to Being John Malkovich, American Beauty to American Pie, The Sixth Sense to Eyes Wide Shut, Election to Magnolia, and Fight Club to The Matrix, it was, as Esquire magazine put it, 'the last great year in movies.' In the year 2039, if anybody is able to tear themselves away from insect burgers and the lurid projections of VR pleasuredomes long enough to reflect on the movies of 2019, what will they have to rhapsodize about? They will look back and see a cultural landscape monopolized by one company: Disney.

Captain Marvel is a triumph. Finally, we have a female superhero! This is progress. This is new. This is fresh. This is terrifying men all over the planet. Not since Ghostbusters 2016 has a movie featured such a strong female lead. I literally cannot think of ONE other comic book-based movie which has a woman in the title role. I wonder why this is? Oh, I know, it’s because Hollywood hates women. The star of the movie, Brie Larson is also a superhero in real life. She bravely spoke out about the negative reviews A Wrinkly Time received, stating that too many white men had seen it. Now, as a black woman, I watched that film with tears in my eyes.

Is it still possible to talk about movies without mentioning superheroes? For the first three months of last year, Black Panther accounted for nearly a quarter of all domestic box office receipts. Eight of the top 20 highest grossing films of all time feature men and women who wear capes and fight crime. The consequence of ticket sales being increasingly concentrated among superhero movies is an increasing concentration of superhero movies. Today this feedback loop has dredged up another one: Captain Marvel. The modern superhero was born in the 1930s. Many of them – like Superman and Captain America – were anti-fascists who smacked Hitler around while fighting for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way.