Overnerded?
I caught the trailer for “Cowboys and Aliens”, and watched a couple of genres collided head on. It didn’t exceedingly awesome, but I’m long past betting for or against films based on trailers made by marketing guys. It did get me thinking about summer blockbusters, and what gets put up on the screen.
I’m pretty sure I’ve railed about this sort of thing before, but it does seem to me that as nerds/pop culture fanatics, we seem to be getting everything we want these days. The majority of summer films for the last few years have a comic book films, or sci-fi/fantasy. I’m not so sure it’s a good thing.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there have been some great things on TV and in the theatres. Games of Thrones is a pretty great looking show (though the shakiness of the writing is hard to ignore sometimes), and things like The Walking Dead and Lord of the Rings are awesome to have around. It just seems like the community is an 8yr old who asked for some cake, and is now being served nothing BUT cake.
And the cake isn’t even that good anymore. The last couple of superhero movies aren’t being met with comments about how awesome they are, or how they’re like a dream come true. It’s mostly “It was better than X, not as good as Y”. Is that the sort of praise that makes you want to run out to the theatre? “the New Pirates of the Caribbean is better than the last two.” Well, the last two were pretty damn crappy, so what exactly does that tell me? (full disclosure, I haven’t yet see Thor, Green Lantern or On Stranger Tides yet).
I’m not even saying cancel them all, kill anything nerd-like. I think there’s a happy medium, and we’ll all be better off when Hollywood starts to grow bored with mining our culture. There were Superhero and Space movies before they became omnipresent, and there will be after.
There’s a downside to the popularity as well. Dc and Marvel see the popularity of say, the Avengers films, and start increasing the number of Avengers titles and cancelling other books to make way. If you look at the Marvel line (DC gets a momentary pass due to the fact that they’re launching 52 new titles, but they’re guilty of the multi books per character as well), over the last few years, books are categorized, and fit in to a “family” or line. Between Spidey, X-Men, and the Avengers, there’s very little that doesn’t fit in one of their orbits. We know they won’t sustain that many titles in one area, it’s a mining operation at best.
Will the Green Lantern film change the course of the books? Will they start homogenizing characters to make them more screen ready? Certainly a certain Shield slinging character recently was removed to align things up with a new movie. The X-men dressed in black leather for a while when the first film came out.
Maybe it’s just me, but even the big screen releases don’t make me crazy excited anymore. I think it’s symptomatic of too much cake. I’m a big Green Lantern fan (full disclosure: Since Blackest Night, it seems to have fallen off the rails), but I wasn’t jumping for joy about a movie coming out. None of this year’s blockbusters made me excited. I’ll catch all of them at some point, none of them in the theatre. I’ll see Avengers next year, as my Whedon crush will outweigh the fact that I think the Avengers are the most boring team in all of comics.
Will I go to Cowboys and Aliens? Probably not. I like Harrison Ford, but he’s not really the Harrison Ford I know and love. Daniel Craig? meh. One good reason to go…
Your thoughts? opinions? cake?
