New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

6. Thor - Thor's second film didn't show huge growth compared to his first at home, but overseas it did brilliantly, which suggests a lot for his global appeal. I could see the third Thor being a potential gargantuan hit, especially coming off the second Avengers, but for now he hasn't shown quite the strength that Cap has.

7. Wolverine - How times change. Back when the original X-Men trilogy ended in 2006, I'd have put Wolverine way higher in this list, but his years as a solo figure haven't been kind. His first film did well but was pretty poisonously received, especially when compared to the strong critical notices that greeted the X-Men films (reviews that contributed to its success and helped pave the way for our current cape-obsessed climate) and his second film, while an improvement, quality wise, struggled with the bad will generated by the first. Still, he was the main draw in the X-Men films, and his return to the fold with Days of Future Past says a lot about how important he is to that series.

8. The Hulk - The Hulk is an interesting prospect since although the character has been indifferently received on two separate occasions now, I would say that if you opened a Hulk film now, and if you managed to do a half-decent job with it, it'd probably do better than either Thor film domestically. This obviously all lies in the success of The Avengers, which Hulk (as played by Mark Ruffalo) was the breakout star of, and which finally found a way to make the human and monster elements as interesting as each other, without letting one dominate too much. However, without any empirical data to support this assertion, even though I firmly believe that a post-Avengers landscape is the perfect one in which to release a Hulk film and have it actually work, he has to sit so low based on past performance, rather than theoretical potential.

9. The X-Men (not including Wolverine) - This placing is based solely on X-Men: First Class, which technically did involve Wolverine but that was only for a single line of dialogue, so he might as well not be included. That film did worse than all the other previous films in the series, which suggests that a) X-Men 3: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine ate up a lot of goodwill for X-Men and X-Men related products, and b) that a lot of the appeal of the original films lay in the charisma of the performers, rather than the characters themselves. The reintroduction of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan (alongside Hugh Jackman) for the newest one says a lot about how much their involvement contributed to the initial, groundbreaking success of the series.

In terms of superhero fatigue, this is what I think: It's a term that has been thrown around a lot over the last few years, usually every time that a film underperforms or flops, and each time it has been disproven within months of being uttered. That doesn't mean that it won't ever happen, but I think that we are some years off from a time when people are tired of superhero films on principle. The genre is in a similar position to CGI animated films; the novelty of the style and form has worn off, so success is not guaranteed just because a film involves a superhero. Success is much more dependent on quality, appeal and brand, as evidenced by the loyalty Marvel now enjoys, and the general quality of superhero films has been kept fairly high, something which has been helped by the failure of the truly terrible ones like Green Lantern. If Marvel gets arrogant and starts churning out substandard product at the rate it's been going, then audiences might sour. But if studios keep trying to make good films, then I see no reason why the superhero genre could not continue as a thriving genre for years or even decades, even if specific characters' popularity wanes over that time.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5