Matthew Vaugh has never kept his opinions to himself and when he turned down directing X-Men 3, he was quoted criticizing his replacement saying “I could have made something a hundred times better than the film that was eventually made. It sounds arrogant, but I could have done something with far more emotion and heart.” Which I hope is true as he is heading up X-Men First Class.
But Vaughn predicts that the current trend of Superhero blockbusters has an expiry date and he thinks we only have a few more left before audiences get tired of it. Cinema Blend quotes Vaughn:
“I’ve always wanted to do a big-budget superhero film and I think we’ve kind of crossed the Rubicon with superhero films. I think [the opportunity to do one], it’s only going to be there two or three more times. Then the genre is going to be dead for a while because the audience has just been pummeled too much.”
Matthew Vaughn is a very respected man and while I tend to agree on his public statements I just have to stick my neck out here and suggest he is not entirely right about this prediction.
While I think the intolerance to quality control is a valid point. The fans have seen things like Dark Knight and X-Men with real quality, so why let it slip? Are we going to tolerate it and line up like lemmings because there is an X in the title?
So I do hope he is right about the death of weak superhero movies.
But I honestly don’t see Superhero films going away entirely because the market has a lot of them.
That is like saying they market won’t tolerate any more horrors as they have been done to death and many without any quality control.
Slashers gave way to supernaturals which gave way to torture porn and shock horror. Every variation of horror is still horror, and it grows and evolves as its audiences do.
The superhero genre will adapt like any genre does. As things grow in popularity, so too are their movies along that popular vein. While Superhero films were once at best a B-Movie niche market, they are now dominating summer blockbusters because someone decided to take them seriously.
There was a time when a Scott Pilgrim movie wouldn’t even be considered, and is now one of the hottest anticipated film of the summer. Genres adapt.
Honestly, with Marvel Films opening its own studio to market its own properties, and WB following suit by creating a DC Entertainment division with its own banner to develop its comic book titles, I doubt this will be a “one more season” thing.
They will adapt, and maybe shift focus. But they will not die off.
Still ironic words for the man already attached to produce and direct a 2012 release of Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall.
