Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Marvel has built a multi-billion-dollar industry out of making movies where colorful heroes fight mustache-twirling supervillains. In real-life, no such villains exist, but that hasn’t kept Kevin Feige from having an ongoing showdown with his own Big Bad: superhero fatigue. After the Marvel Cinematic Universe reached its apex with Avengers: Endgamesubsequent films stopped printing money as reliably as they once did. Audiences yawned at ambitious failures like Eternalsand even critically acclaimed blockbusters like The Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps couldn’t earn as much money as Supermanthe breakout film of last summer. Historically, the main reason given for Marvel’s decline is that its fans are suffering from superhero fatigue.
The basic idea behind superhero fatigue is that audiences have gotten sick of seeing the same characters do the same thing onscreen. You can only watch Sam Wilson kick butt in so many Avengers movies before seeing him fight a palette-swapped Hulk in Captain America: Brave New World seems pretty boring, right? The exception to this seems to be Spider-Man, who is about to have his 12th film in 24 years. We’re averaging a new movie every other year, but this remains the most popular superhero in the world. Why is he seemingly immune to superhero fatigue? Simple: Spider-Man films keep changing characters, actors, and stories, making everything feel constantly fresh and new.
Spider-Man: Good Old Days
Since Sam Raimi kicked off his web-head trilogy in 2002, every Spider-Man film has been very successful. Even the ones that audiences generally hated ended up making some serious bank at the box office. For example, Spider-Man 3 was considered a major dud by critics and fans alike, but it still earned $895.9 million; by comparison, the critically acclaimed, fan-favorite film Spider-Man 2 only earned $795.9 million. Later, The Amazing Spider-Man 2which is blamed for killing Sony’s own Spidey cinematic universe, earned $716.9 million, which was admittedly less than the previous movie’s $758.7 million, but it was still the seventh highest-grossing movie of 2012.
There’s a pretty simple lesson there: moviegoers really, really like Spider-Man. They like this superhero so much that even when we get a bad Spidey movie with terrible word-of-mouth, it still does gangbusters at the box office. Once Sony reluctantly partnered with Marvel, Spider-Man movies earned more than ever before, with No Way Home earning a jaw-dropping $1.921 billion. Clearly, this is one character that is immune to superhero fatigue because even his worst movies make bank for the studio. Why, though, is Spidey immune? By both accident and design, his movies have offered audiences the variety and diversity they just can’t get from other heroes.
Spider-Man Just Keeps Changing
Let’s start with the original Sam Raimi trilogy. The first Spider-Man was a fairly intimate origin story, one that kept the stakes appropriately low. Spider-Man 2however, was a romance wrapped in spandex tights, and it upped the stakes so that Spidey was saving trains full of people and, eventually, the entire city. The much-maligned Spider-Man 3meanwhile, served as a deconstruction of the relationship between power and responsibility, emphasizing Peter’s essential goodness even as it highlighted an internal struggle against selfish desire and an external struggle against more villains than ever before.
Later, The Amazing Spider-Man offered audiences some built-in novelty. This reboot sported entirely new actors, and its revised origin story felt fresh thanks to the natural chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was an ambitious film that balanced the cute growing relationship between Peter and Gwen Stacey with a story about complex family legacies (Harry and Norman Osborn), nice guy toxicity (Max Dillon going from geek to freak), and taking chances (Gwen’s potential Oxford scholarship). Admittedly, the movie is crowded by too many plots and too many villains, but credit where credit’s due, it’s very different and anything but boring.
A Spider By Any Other Name Would Smell Just As Sweet
The success of the MCU Spider-Man movies more or less speaks for itself, as does the failure of most of Sony’s solo Spidey villain franchises except for Venom. The failure of those Big Bad’s movies really underscores that audiences are in it to see their favorite superhero and not just his B-list enemies. Notably, Sony’s Spider-Verse movies were an unqualified smash hit thanks largely to awesome writing, jaw-dropping animation, and familiar characters. But it’s also worth pointing out how quickly audiences fell in love with a new Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Throw in Gwen Stacey and Peter Parker as we had never seen them before, and you had films that felt genuinely innovative.
In short, the Spider-Man films have always been successful because each one is either reinventing the character or giving us a fresh storyline. None of Sam Raimi’s Spidey films are quite the same, and Marc Webb’s duology features two very different movies. The Spider-Verse movies deal with entirely different versions of familiar characters, while even the MCU changed things up: Homecoming was a coming-of-age film, Far From Home was a movie about processing grief, and No Way Home was a multiversal mashup. Now, Brand New Day is about to change things up with a small army of cameos and new characters, even as Spider-Black completely changes everything we know about Spidey-style storytelling.
There you have it, web-heads: superhero fatigue doesn’t truly exist. Audiences are simply sick of watching the same actors playing the same characters doing the same things. For almost a quarter of a century, Spider-Man has remained the most popular superhero, and this is largely because his movies have constantly changed up actors, characters, and plots. The constant success of this character is effectively a challenge to Marvel Studios. Namely, adapt or die. If they can give other characters the variety and narrative versatility of Spidey, they’ll thrive. Otherwise, the MCU will die because fans will be busy watching movies like Obsession and Backrooms that offer what Kevin Feige no longer can: new ideas.
