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Most hilariously (to me) is the vast difference in 'powers' between superheroes. There are the 'Gods' - some literal, like Thor, or godlike otherwise - and the 'normals'. Gods can fly, shoot lasers from their eyes, or call down lightning. Normals can, well, shoot bows or kick really well.

So in the ensemble movies (like Avengers) you get teams where some of the members are in no danger at all - the Gods - while the others are very much in danger! Except of course, the viewer knows that none of the good guys are really at risk of serious injury.

I'm sure directors try to avoid or work around this, but fundamentally if the big bad guy can knock out the strongest god (eg Thanos vs Hulk) then if they so much as strike one of the normals, they should really be dead.

Finally, it's very funny to me that Scorsese got criticised for expressing an opinion on movies. I mean, I've watched a lot of these crappy superheor movies, and they are enjoyable enough at times, but it's not great cinema ...

Scorsese eh? What does he know about cinema, right? Okay, enough sarcasm. I think a lot of people share his opinion but they won't publicly criticize the enormous money printing studios that eventually give them jobs. Disney is a beast of many tentacles and if you speak out against one aspect you might find yourself turned down in other departments which might actually matter to you.

I think though that it's a huge compromise and sometimes as far as giving up your artistic integrity when you make a superhero blockbuster. You're making entertainment for kids, you're being pinned by focus groups, ad men and franchising demands, not to mention the strict age requirements, and as of late, olbigatory cultural stances. How can you even make a movie like that?

Don't even get me started on the ensemble movies. Those are atrocious. Good luck jamming 40 lead heroes in your movie and having anything substantial happen to their characters. Not that having them together makes any sense. Even if you own both Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, thay don't mix! They have a completely different vibe!

It would be a fun experiment to create a Marvel Movie Script Generator and see if you can get something resembling (or even better?) than their usual shtick.

Of course, money is to blame. When your movie is a corporate product designed to earn for shareholders, you get pictures like MCU and the Transformers movies. These movies are doing their job. Too bad for us for being interested in an engaging, original experience. Thank goodness off beat studios exist that produce some actually interesting movies.

This sketch from "Peep Show" is relevant to your argument:

https://youtu.be/zFuMpYTyRjw

Geniuses.

Very small detail, it’s from Mitchell & Webb Look, but Peep Show is great too.

Apropos role-playing games: superhero universes are a great example of how you don't want to end up in your storytelling. Mashing everything together (I believe the term is "jamming") just so everyone can have what they want, with no regard to consistency. Here's a Norse god with a mallet, here's a guy who got bitten by a radioactive spider.

Official RPG campaign did it a lot, because of course they wanted to sell the X supplements to the Y players too.

Yes, indeed. I understand that some editions of D&D are considered class-unbalanced because high level mages are so powerful.

When one member of the party can stop time, call down meteors or kill with a word then just being able to swing a sword really well seems less impressive.

I haven’t seen the boys. I tend not to enjoy the edgy deconstruction genres. I think they’re over shoot their pessimism. But I would ask, do characters really have a sense of danger associated with them? Game of Thrones was a series that supposedly did this, but I think that was very much a lie. Ned’s death and the red wedding were unexpected events. But they were largely setup for the story. After that many characters wore their shiniest plot armor. There was 0 chance Arya was going to die having left to some random murder cult and never actually impacting the story. Similarly for bran, and Jon, and most characters. Even most of the lesser characters had a fair chunk of plot armor. It’s largely unavoidable as plot threads spread out. I’d guess it’s fairly similar for the boys.

The Boys shows a realistic version of superhero reality where powers actually create huge problems in the physical sense. It is combined with very juicy gore to increase the effect. A lot of it happens ny mistake.

That alone is an interesting take, but it gets better when dealing with the actual heroes. It's a great parody of Marvel and plenty of cultural queues. They explore a reality where the superheroes are marketable products and everything they do is for the optics. In reality, they are horrible, horrible people with a God complex that often do horrifying things.

It's the best superhero story I enjoyed in a long, long time.

Eh. I don’t buy it. So many people think it’s smarter to be cynical. I don’t. Anime does this all the time ever since evangelion. So many mangakas crawling over each other to show how much more depraved humanity really is than the last.

I haven’t seen the boys so I can’t comment on it specifically but I would ask, is it really “realistic” or is it just cynical?

> I haven’t seen the boys so I can’t comment on it specifically but I would ask, is it really “realistic” or is it just cynical?

It's a different take. In a world where some people have absolute power, would they get absolutely corrupted?

The answer (from The Boys) is not so clear cut.

See that’s where I have a problem.

Spider-Man isn’t a series that says what would happen if a dude got spider powers and fought crime. It’s a story about a specific person, built around specific themes. Stories aren’t simulations.

Some people think that if a deconstruction work has characters die, because normally some people would die if they fight all the time, that it must be a realistic portrayal of what would happen. That’s false! It’s still a story and glossing over the boys it certainly doesn’t seem very different. It’s not a story about what would happen if superheroes were real and had too much power. It’s a story about some specific assholes mostly who have superpowers.

The real answer is that if people gained super powers, they would not start being superheroes to begin with.

We can discuss that, but first let me recommend the movie Chronicle (2012) which really is as realistic as I imagine it would get.

Conerecing The Boys, it's not about humanity as much as it's about American stuff. It's being very very specific with its criticism. Homelander is not just a psychopath, he's a product, literally, of American culture (represented by conglomerate Vaught).

Also, while The Boys has criticism and some characters might not survive, it's also very tongue in cheek and tries to entertain rather than lecture. Personally I have fun watching it. If nothing else, it manages to surprise me, which is not something I could say about superhero movies in the last ten years.

> It’s not a story about what would happen if superheroes were real and had too much power. It’s a story about some specific assholes mostly who have superpowers.

No, the absolute power/absolute corruption in The Boys is not in the superheros.

It explores both. Some characters are cynical. Others, like (one of) the main characters Huey, is a hopeless romantic who believes in the basic goodness of people and doing the right thing. He also listens to a lot of Billy Joel.

If fact, I would argue that the juxtaposition of the main characters being essentially polar opposite’s is what gives the show most of its effective (dark) comedic moments.

The Boys is the closest a studio can come to producing realistic reactions, effects, and backstory for superheroes.

The cynicism is portrayed, and expounded upon, by several of the show's characters.

It's not cynicism for cynicism's sake, or just to be edgy. The dystopian feel that the series imparts isn't corny or overdone. I imagine this is how a world with superheroes would act/react.

What other anime do you have in mind? You're ignoring a lot of series to get that impression. Most anime are based on manga out of Shonen Jump, which follow Jump's guidelines of friendship, adventure, and overcoming obstacles through teamwork.

> After that many characters wore their shiniest plot armor.

Season 4 was when things started going downhill with the "writing" team, and that plot armor is one of the major reasons. But it most definitely wasn't a lie before that or in the books.

Some of the zombie shows have killed off nearly all of their starting cast (some... haven't).

I mean, we'll see. In comic books, no one has managed to stay dead for long. In the MCU, they're still playing around with it.

Iron Man? Dead. Black Widow? Dead, returned for a prequel. Captain America? Dead, Captain Britain showed up for a cameo. Vision? Dead, returned in a magic dream for a span, still probably dead? Hawkeye? Retired, body battered beyond further use. Scarlet witch? Probably dead.

Only Loki is really playing into to the trope of "Dead, but not really, over and over again."

The big difference from the comics, of course, is that actors actually get older.

There's still the possibility of a reboot of the MCU (I've made peace with the idea of "the story of Spiderman" being retold periodically the way we keep remaking Romeo and Juliet, but rebooting the entire MCU seems different) or "I'm Tony B Stark from another reality, I'm technically not a reboot and look slightly different but I'm basically the same character."

There's also the question of where imitators fall; is Kate Bishop just a reboot of Hawkeye?

If you judge any movie where the protagonist will most likely win to be bad you will probably dislike most movies.

If you abstract any long comment into a vaguely related single sentence, you can make anyone sound silly. Lucky for me you're trying to associate something completely different to my comment which is clearly not what I meant to say.

But what did you say beyond other than what I commented on? The main thrust of your comment is that super hero movies are boring because you know they won't die and will probably win. Does that make detective book bad because the protagonist usually solves the case? Does it make rom-coms bad because the main couple usually end up together?

> The predictability and cookie cutter stories of today's superhero movies made them into an unengaging, boring waste of time. I assume they work for younger viewers but I really can't understand how any adult who respects their own time can enjoy these.

Humans have enjoyed staring into dancing firelight for millenia. No plot even, and you know exactly what will happen to the flames in the end. What if not being able to just hang out and marvel pleasantly at visual spectacle is bad and the films are actually fine?

Superhero movies are certainly not high cinema, but I challenge the "no risk" assertion. In the first 22 MCU films, the heroes take major losses in 5 films (e.g., a city is destroyed with impact affecting the rest of the series). The heroes suffer more personal losses in many other movies beyond those 5 (e.g., losing a loved one).

So you usually know what you will get, but the villain winning or partially winning is a credible threat.

I haven't watched all the movies (or even the majority?) but cities getting trashed while fighting has definitely become a meme. It never feels like there are any ramifications, you never see people actually get hurt even when huge skyscrapers collapse in the middle of the street. If there was an impact for the rest of the series, I haven't noticed, but the destruction scenes just feel like none of it has any weight or meaning besides the cool CGI. Passing mentions about an attack on NYC is not showing the actual consequences of these events.

The "major losses" always felt like they are manifactured in a shallow and meaningless way. You know your heroes aren't going to lose, or die, or get too badly injured. They will always bounce back and the damage will be reversed.

And this is all fine given you accept that superhero movies are primarily entertainment for kids. Which by the way explains why we get the same reboots and origin stories every 10-15 years for a fresh batch of kids.

Of course it's a matter of taste but I just don't see any substance in these movies. Honestly even when I was a kid myself I never really saw the appeal in something like "Batman vs Superman" or "Godzilla vs King Kong". It always seemed pointless to me. As an adult I am just puzzled trying to understand how these movies can hold anyone's attention. But to each their own I guess.

I have no choice but to wholly agree with Scorsese. Unengaging, predictable, day care in a theater.

One frustrating thing about Marvel properties is they frequently almost have a point or address their own messes or even something important in the real world—but then pull back before actually saying anything. A couple of the Spider Man movies have done this, Falcon and Winter Soldier had a bad case of this, a few of the other films (Black Panther comes to mind—a riskier version of that film with a somewhat shifted perspective and a bit more bite could have been amazing). Most just don't even try to take a stance on anything whatsoever, but sometimes they start to and it's like "oh man is this going to be actually good instead of just good-for-a-Marvel-movie good?" but... no, never.

On the other hand, the TV series are spectacularly good. Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage...

> I am just sitting here for an entire decade waiting for great, engaging movies to make a comeback.

Tons exist, lots and lots of movies are made every year.

My 12 year old calls the invincibility of superheros “plot armor”.