Superhero Films: Is Genre Fatigue soon to come?

Today Marvel Studios head producer Kevin Feige announced the full roster of what would constitute the third phase of their film franchise.

Needless to say I have very mixed views on this while I will be excited for the 2nd Guardians of the Galaxy film and the Infinity War Avengers 2 parter the rest of the lineup left me feeling fairly cold especially the announcement of the Inhumans film to come in November of 2018.

Allow me now to talk a little more about Inhumans as the comic basically dealt with a race of super humans located in space with powers not all that different to the X-Men as they too had genetically engineered powers and to put my cynic hat on I wonder if Mr. Feige and Marvel Studios are pushing ahead with this property as a stick to beat 20th Century Fox over the head with given that Fox controls the film rights to X-Men and Marvel Studios does not but we will simply have to wait and see on that front given that I'm sure some comic book fans would love to see the X-Men back in Marvel's hands.

But the main point I want to make in this column is that when I looked at this lineup as well as the recently announced slate of films from Warner Brothers and DC Comics the word "fatigue" started coming to mind.

And the reason I felt that way is that there is going to be an onslaught of these films coming from 2016 onwards for not only will we get the start of DC's slate of superhero films as well as the start of Marvel's Phase 3 but we will also get Fox's X-Men Apocalypse in cinemas and I can't help but wonder if during that year we start to see audiences get fatigued by all of these superhero films opening in cinemas virtually at the same time (Captain America 3 and Apocalypse will open within 3 weeks of each other in May 2016.)

Earlier this year when I was waiting to see Edge of Tomorrow I saw a little bit of this happen as along with myself there was an older man there waiting as well and he said to me "I'm sick of all the superhero ones" (ones being movies to clarify the point) and that comment has stuck with me ever since.

They've also had me wondering if those comments will not become as small a scale as they are at the moment during the 2016 to 2020 phase of this genre as all it can take for a genre to go off the rails is for one of them to fail dismally at the box office as happened with the buddy cop genre of the late 80s and early 90s which was going on strong with multiple studios putting out those films until 1993's Last Action Hero crashed and burned at the box office after that you didn't see very many of them being made.

And although Marvel are good at oiling their cinematic universe machine very well DC may not be I mean look at the changes that Dawn of Justice has gone through on its path to production and if one of theirs fails well it may accelerate the feelings of fatigue that could be bubbling under the surface.

But as to whether it will actually come to fruition on a public scale well we will simply have to wait and see but as for myself well I have to say yes in that as much as I have enjoyed these superhero films as a sort of cinematic soft drink that's fun to have as your sitting there in the cinema or at home on a DVD possibly with a real soft drink in your seat's cup holder very few of them have held up for me in terms of replay value because of reasons I have documented elsewhere.

And also looking at both of these Marvel and DC lineups also made me yearn for an old fashioned action film where the hero didn't wear a mask or a suit of tights as well as a more adult film like a good drama which sadly has been pretty much relegated to the independent and art house circuits whereas 10 or 15 years ago they were much more a part of the mainstream of our cinema going lives.

As this column is getting fairly lengthy I will wrap it up here but I hope you have enjoyed my thoughts on this whole matter and it gives you something to think about at the very least.