There’s a line in my favorite movie ever Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith where Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi says, “Wait a minute, how did this happen? We’re smarter than this!” To which his straightforward apprentice Anakin Skywalker topically replies:
“Apparently not.”
I feel like that’s where we’re at with superhero cinema, and honestly cinema in its entirety. It’s become a depressing wasteland of soulless tentpole films and the modern audience’s lack of interest in theatrical releases has resulted in an unhealthy dearth of “genre” films surviving — or even being made — at the box office.
I yearn for the years of 2012-2016 where I could find a movie almost every other weekend that either satisfied my superhero cravings or scratched the itch of a quality artsy film.
Somehow, in 2023, something super (doctor) strange has happened in the landscape of superhero films, which has always been and remains my choice brand despite the best efforts of the companies making these films.
If I asked you which superhero movie franchise you trusted right now, which would you choose?
- Option A: The Marvel Cinematic Universe
- Option B: The Star Wars Universe
- Option B: The DC Universe
- Option C: The Sony Spider-Verse
At the moment, It's like picking your favorite vegetable.
Faith has been lost in the Marvel Cinematic Universe post-Endgame and it’s not because audiences were tired of the MCU, it’s because the quality has both drastically dropped and also become diluted with the advent of so many subpar Disney+ shows.
The DC Universe, which is under new leadership as of 2022, has had no momentum or direction since its inception in 2013 with the mediocre Man of Steel. They tried to play catchup with 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and instead of chasing Marvel, they buried their own aspirations of a shared universe.
So, here in 2023, this is your superhero movie/television slate to date:
- January: The Bad Batch (It's a Star Wars show)
- February: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
- March: The Mandalorian
- March: Shazam! Fury of the Gods
- May: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
- June: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
- June: The Flash
- June: Secret Invasion
- July: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (If you want to count it)
One of these movies/shows was great. And, in a shocking development to even yours truly, it’s the one owned and operated by the company that is Sony Pictures.
That’s right. The film studio that squandered Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and the Amazing Spider-Man films -- though they were generally received with lukewarm reactions, they are two of my all-time favorite motion pictures -- has somehow emerged as the top dog in 2023.
How did this happen? Well, Disney's MCU has orchestrated their own free fall by producing lazy scripts that serve no overarching purpose filled with agenda-driven spiel and lifeless performances from accomplished actors. What Disney did to Star Wars has now happened to Marvel. Their unforgiving formula of castrating legacy (male) characters at the mercy of propping up new (female) characters that become heroes overnight without any training, time or effort has, to put it delicately, been unsuccessful.
And guess who got the treatment in 2023? The Mandalorian, Disney Star Wars's only somewhat reliable product left. Mando joins others in 2023 who have ALREADY been sidelined: Ant-Man for his daughter Cassie, Nick Fury, animated Peter Parker, Drax the non-Destroyer, and now Din Djarin for Bo Katan. I don't even need to see Indiana Jones 5 to know that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is going to steal the show. And that's just 2023! And we're in July!
Marvel's foray into streaming started out with some meh and is now a garbage heap desperate for viewership. Whether it's the forced politics of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the disregard for previous canon in Loki, the tired deadbeat male hero trend in Hawkeye, the snooze fest of Ms. Marvel or the flat out abomination that was She-Hulk... it's no coincidence these shows pull up the rear of my all-time MCU rankings.
DC hasn't had a plan for years, passing their films off to various directors and writers who seem to have no idea what to do with these fan-favorite superheroes. It was tolerable when movies like the first Wonder Woman and first Shazam! served to entertain, but both of those respective sequels are a perfect example of where we are with superhero cinema: in the abyss.
With the public starving for content, here comes Sony, swinging in to capitalize on this sudden vacancy in the superhero market. Sony's rise in the marketplace is for one reason and one reason only: Spider-Man.
(I also covered Sony's unexpected and relative "rise" HERE.)
Spidey is their sole superhero property (although they could have had Marvel's entire catalogue of characters back in the 90s) and they have certainly stretched that to the limits with spin-offs like Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius and the upcoming films Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web.
Those have been as good as they sound, but Sony has two franchises that are soaring above the rest right now: Spider-Verse and Tom Holland's Spider-Man trilogy.
Holland's movies are a joint venture between Sony and Disney Marvel, but Sony is distributing those movies and gets the majority of the ticket stubs. 2021's nostalgic Spider-Man: No Way Home is the highest-grossing domestic film since 2019, but what really came as a surprise was the 2018 smash hit, the animated comic book dream realized in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
That movie was a great success and spawned two sequels, Across the Spider-Verse in 2023 and Beyond the Spider-Verse in 2024.
Which brings me to my final point. How do you really measure an audience's trust in any movie franchise? I could go door to door asking people but that seems like slightly too much effort, so let's look at the most reliable evidence of all: the box office.
Here are your top 10 most successful domestic films, measured by highest gross, in 2023 as of July 2023. (I have also included my grade for each film if I've seen them.)
- Super Mario Bros. (B-)
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (A+)
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (C+)
- The Little Mermaid
- Avatar: The Way of Water
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (C)
- John Wick: Chapter 4 (B)
- Creed III (B)
- Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
- Fast X
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