Superhero Fatigue

Superhero Fatigue is less about quantity and more about the kind of story being told vs. what audiences want to see. The problem is not that we have a handful of new superhero movies every year, but that they feel very similar to each other, and not in a good way. If the undeniable success of movies like Wonder Woman tell us anything is that audiences are starving for stories that break the usual pattern of superhero films.

Three patterns in particular that can be causing superhero fatigue are as follows: 1) Tone - sometimes you need the bleakness to make your point, as with dystopian novels. 2) Story - Superhero movies are often repetitive in the basic narrative structure they choose, giving us the feeling that we’ve seen that story before. 3) Characters - This is probably the core of superhero fatigue, since you can’t have a great range of stories when they’re always about the same people. Different identities bring in different perspectives and different ways to interact with the world.

“I'm hoping we'll start getting 'Superhero Fatigue here pretty soon,” Gamer On! said. “Not that I don't love the movies. It's just, come on guys, there are other stories to tell besides hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process. It's like, oyster!”.

Superhero Fatigue by Outis McGuffin May 31, 2018