It’s been quite a run for superhero movie geeks in this past month, as DC and Marvel have set up some 40-odd films in the next six years.
Sure, we’ll all be totally sick of the things by then, but that won’t stop these corporations from their pursuit of money. (Oh, I mean serving fans.)
As much as I have enjoyed this 21st-century run of superhero movie mania from Hollywood, there is still many a day that geeks of another hue and/or gender especially have been left hanging.
Don’t get me wrong: I loved The Dark Knight, own pretty all of Marvel’s Phase One movies on home video, saw The Avengers at a midnight show, caught both Hellboy flicks in the theater. At this point in the game, I need someone other than a straight white guy at the center.
So I have a bit of about-damn-time mixed with it’s-too-late that we’ll get a Wonder Woman solo movie and Black Panther in 2017, Carol Danvers-era Captain Marvel in 2018, and Cyborg in 2020.
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| Can I get a “hell yeah”? |
Will we actually get all of these movies in the next six years? I don’t know; one bad box office showing can change the world. And last year we already were debating whether we’re at peak superhero. So it could be that we’ll get to the women and black superheroes at the worst possible time.
Plus, given the variance of the comics business, DC and Marvel could be spinning off into totally different directions in a few years, which could affect the on-screen product because the comics are different.
Today, this blerd is just gonna jump up and down and scream, “Finally!”
What can I say, I cheer diversity pretty much any time, even if at times it has a humanity-sucking cynical reality of a select few asked to the privileged and powerful kids’ table.
However, that’s how an inequitable imbalance of power works, as America’s racial and gender hierarchy affected the comics industry pushing diverse characters to the bench. Those bigotries were baked into fans’ reactions and expectations, to television studios stuck in outmoded thinking about selling toys to boys, to movie studios putting one demographic above all others.
We’ve had dozens of these superhero movies since 1999’s X-Men, with a straight white guy at the center of all of them except Elektra and Catwoman. If we move up to the mega-glut of superhero films since 2005’s Batman Begins, then it’s none at all.
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| Never forget |
It got to the point where with each Marvel movie announced, I called it “Still No Black Panther Movie.” I had to hear about Ant-Man for years – years – but no Black Panther, the first black superhero in mainstream comics.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier brought us Black Widow and Falcon working alongside Cap as partners, not sidekicks. But we heard about Doctor Strange before Black Panther. We even got to a talking space raccoon and a living tree in a movie starring the chubby doofus from Parks and Recreation before even a sniff at the king of Wakanda.
At least we had the smaller-scale Blade movies, which were about a black man and white hillbilly slashing and hacking at effete eurotrash vampires. Well, the first two were, and then the third film made them take a backseat to the not-fat-anymore guy from Van Wilder and the pretty girl from 7th Heaven.
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| Look out, Wesley! They’re gonna take the movie from you! |
And speaking of X-Men, there’s no stronger example of Hollywood whitewashing/mansplaining, as the most diverse cast of characters in all of superhero comics was turned into a series of films all about Wolverine, Professor X and Magneto.
Storm was reduced to a few lines half-heartedly delivered by an Oscar-winning actress given nothing to do but wave her arms around. Kitty Pryde – the one who time-travels and does all the cool stuff in the comics version of Days of Future Past – was replaced by, you guessed it, Wolvie in the movie version. And Mystique goes from slinky killer-for-hire to a femme fatale both defined by and torn between two men, even though she’s played expertly by another Oscar-winning actress who is given something to do.
So, what kinds of Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Cyborg will assault our senses, speeding through the air over thundering hero music?
For me, the real question is, how prepared are these rooms full of mostly white dudes to bring about the fully realized worlds of these characters?
Wakanda is an Afro-futurist paradise as a furiously unconquered African nation that is decades beyond the rest of the developed world in science, medicine and technology. With a superpowered king who communes with a god.
To me, only black author Reginald Hudlin truly hit on the magnitude of such mind-fuckery in the world in his run on the character that at times felt like a Milestone product. Hudlin wrote a Black Panther that dealt with racism, not just race, and what happens to white supremacy when up against a nation of black people superior in every way.
Will the film version of Wakanda be washed out as some “magical” fantasy kingdom, and be drowned out amid the Marvel Studios’ slow march to the Civil War and Infinity War?
What will happen to Paradise Island, recast as Themyscira thanks to George Lopez? So far, it looks like we’re getting the New 52 version of Wonder Woman, who is no longer clay-given-life and is a bastard daughter of Zeus. And the Amazons much more worldly and conventional, by building their plush paradise on rape and murder.
Will we have more of the grim blood-and-guts of Brian Azzarello’s comics, which seems to fit DC’s humorless attitude? Or can we get some mix of all-embracing psychological weirdness, fun, queer kinkiness, feminine superiority and strong-woman circus act that was William Moulton Marston and Harry Peter’s vision?
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| Matronly admonishment for a child audience, or sweet BDSM games? I think it’s both |
These are the days of pop culture lesbionics, where seemingly every woman is heteroflexible. The days of daily social media conversations on the multiplex diversity of third-wave feminism. The days of using feminine purity to restrict women’s rights. The days of 21st-century feminist backlash through men’s rights activists, GamerGate, involuntary celibates and mass shooters.
And it’s also the days of some wings in pop culture looking to move beyond the “difficult man” who rules serious drama, with Scandal‘s Olivia Pope ruling the airwaves; the millennial Woody Allen-ish confusion/dementia of Lena Dunham’s Girls; the warrior women of The Walking Dead; and the women-are-meat tropes of Game of Thrones.
This really couldn’t be a better time for Wonder Woman to arrive, wrap people in her lasso and control them to do better — or at least different.
If the current comics won’t give us that layered complexity again from Marston’s psychological experiment, perhaps a film can. If they just let Julie Taymor write and direct the dang thing, it might.
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| Adding Jessica Lange to the cast won’t hurt, either |
Because, truly, I don’t want the things that make Princess Diana, Carol Danvers, T’Challa and Victor Stone distinct and different to be stamped out for superhero generics. I don’t want this diversity to be subsumed into the soft, safe we’re-all-the-same, it’s-a-universal-story attitude that often turns into assimilation.
Don’t lose the soul, and don’t fake the funk.
I guess I can’t truly expect that from a horde of mass-marketed blockbuster hopefuls manufactured by multinational corporations.
But sometimes it happens, because in our age of the superhero, we’ve seen Hellboy and Iron Man, The Dark Knight and The Winter Soldier – it can be done!
I’ll be waiting, and watching.
