This may be the summer that saves comic book movies: Superman and the new Fantastic Four: First Steps breathe new life into the tired comic book movie genre by doing something many comic book movies have been afraid to do: Embrace comic books.
In the early years of comic book adaptations, Hollywood seemed hellbent on distancing comic book-based movies from their source material. The original Superman, good as it was, enlisted the writer and star of The Godfather — Mario Puzo and Marlon Brando — to add gravitas to the Superman story. With 1989’s Batman, Tim Burton admirably found a balance between the camp of the 1960s Batman and the seriousness of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. And Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy dared to get very comics accurate, even using a limited color palette reminiscent of an old comics strip.
But in the early 2000s, as comic book movies began to take over the box office and become essential to studios’ bottom lines, some trends emerged. Movies generally tried to follow comic-book lore without getting so nerdy that general audiences — people who may not have ever read the source material — would be turned off.
While they had many good qualities, the X-Men provide a good example of this have-it-both-ways approach. They put almost everyone in black leather, distancing the films from the outlandish costumes of the comic book X-Men, especially in their freak-flag-flying Chris Claremont era. Christopher Nolan’s excellent Dark Knight films eschewed super powers, giving us a scrupulously logical Batman whose every costume detail served a purpose grounded in reality.
You can listen to our deep dive on Superman on the Low Key Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or here:
Iron Man was so well-grounded that I remember a friend telling me he took his wife to see the 2008 film without telling her what it was about. She thought they were watching a war movie until — 35 minutes in — Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark donned an early prototype of the Iron Man armor. It was only then that she realized she’d been lured into a comic book movie.
Zack Snyder’s superhero films, more than any other comic book movies, drove home the message that they were not for kids: Superman snapped a bad guy’s neck in 2013’s Man of Steel, and grittiness abounded at every turn. The low point was 2016’s gloomy, clunky Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
As the Marvel Universe became more successful, the MCU films occasionally had the confidence to get goofy — and were better for it. 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, led by proud comic book nerd James Gunn, went deep on some of the MCU’s least-memorable characters, including a talking raccoon (who insists he isn’t a raccoon) named Rocket. The next year, Paul Rudd led one of the silliest and best Marvel movies, Ant-Man, about a thief-turned-hero who can shrink to ant-size, and enlist ants in his fight for justice.
But films still sought, for the most part, a middle ground. Some of the biggest Marvel movies were genre movies that happened to feature people with super powers. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a ’70s-style paranoia thriller. Thor: Ragnarok was a trippy sci-fi farce. Black Panther was an Afrofuturist twist on a Bond movie.
When comics-accurate costumes occasionally popped up in comic-book movies, it was cause for celebration among diehard fans — even though they were often played for laughs. Hugh Jackman’s comics-inspired blue and yellow costume for last summer’s Deadpool and Wolverine was a joke on many levels: It was absurd to see such a comics-correct outfit onscreen in any context, but especially on Wolverine, given his grim past screen portrayals, which included, at one point, surviving the bombing of Hiroshima.
The Deadpool films aren’t so much comic book movies as parodies of comic-book movies.
Sony’s 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse did the best job of embracing comic-book lore and history, brilliantly and beautifully. I love it. But because it was animated, it may never have the sense of can’t-believe-my-eyes veracity of this summer’s live-action superhero success stories.
Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps feel entirely new in their live-action embrace of comics. They are unabashedly comic book movies, in love with and totally reverent to their source material. Both have gotten strong reviews, and Superman is already a hit. Fantastic Four, which arrives in theaters this week, is tracking well, thanks in part to strong word of mouth from those who have seen and loved it so far.
Superman and Punk
What’s special aboutSuperman and Fantastic Four: First Steps is that the nerdiest parts are also the best parts.
When we say “nerdy,” of course, we don’t mean it pejoratively — we’re taking the Oxford definition, “characterized by great enthusiasm for and knowledge about a particular subject, especially one of specialist or niche interest.”
Superman writer-director James Gunn came to lead DC Films via a series of complicated events that started with his temporary dismissal from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise over jokey, deliberately offensive tweets. (Right-wing sleuths, upset by his left-wing politics, unearthed them to make him look bad.) Saner heads soon prevailed and he ended up directing DC’s 2021 The Suicide Squad, impressing Warner Bros. execs so much that they put him in charge of the whole DC universe.
It was a dream come true for a kid from outside St. Louis who had coped with a tough childhood by “sort of escap[ing] into my own little world with comic books and books,” as he told MovieMaker in 2021. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of comics, while also embracing punk. He detailed in our 2021 interview how a brief encounter with The Clash’s Joe Strummer, at a record store, changed his entire life.
“Whenever I met anybody who I looked up to, just the act of their being present, just looking at somebody and taking in who they are, it makes a huge difference. Because most people don’t. If you see most people signing autographs or doing whatever, they’re just kind of off in space. But there are people that just take a moment to be with that person—just give them that one moment,” Gunn recalled.
Also Read: The 12 Best Superhero Movies Ever Made
All movies are team efforts – just read the long credits at the end — but Gunn’s new Superman may be as close as a big-budget superhero film will ever get to being a personal film, almost in the auteur tradition, as romanticized and exaggerated as the notion of an auteur may be.
The Superman character seemed impossibly outdated just a few years ago, as superhero movies tried to humanize the comic-book characters by giving them profound vulnerabilities and making them look more like the general populace. An all-powerful white male didn’t feel in keeping with the times.
But Gunn went back to the character’s roots as a creation of two Jewish-American children of immigrants, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who introduced him as a beacon of hope, even as Nazism spread with alarming speed across Europe.
Gunn’s Superman reminds us — elegantly — that Superman is an immigrant and a striver, trying to assimilate and gain acceptance by being good. He rejects the idea of utilitarianism or collateral damage, stopping in the middle of huge battles to save children and even, at one point, a squirrel.
He’s not the kind of guy who would ever brush off a kid in a record store. In fact, he comes very close to dying fairly early in the film — because he sacrifices himself to save his dog, Krypto. ( Who isn’t even really his dog.)
Lois Lane, the human be most wants to impress, is a self-identifying punk rocker. Clark Kent listened to the coolest music available to a Kansas farm kid — a light pop-punk band called The Mighty Crabjoys — and Gunn is confident enough to start the Superman end credits with a song by the Teddy Bears and punk icon Iggy Pop, “Punkrocker,” the kind of cool anthem Lois would love — and then continue with “The Mighty Crabjoys Theme,” a song Gunn helped write.
It’s hard to imagine another comic-book movie going so deep into nerdery. It’s notable that none of the seven other Superman movies came close to mentioning Krypto, one of the silliest Superman characters — much less making him crucial to the movie. And Superman doesn’t stop with Krypto.
There’s a giant kaiju, who is treated sympathetically. Metamorpho, a character who dates back to the ’60s and has especially cartoonish powers, gets a moving and important arc. And Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), a tragic, often-overlooked character in the comics, gets an essential and scene-stealing part in Superman.
The Teamwork of Fantastic Four: First Steps
Superman feels in many ways like a moviemaking miracle — Gunn has balanced heart, real emotion and comic-book deep cuts like no one else. It may feel like Gunn is able to get away with this kind of deep dive because he’s not only the creative pitching the studio executive, but — as the co-head of DC Films — he is the studio executive.
But thrillingly, Fantastic Four: First Steps, released in the same month, achieves similar success, with a very different approach.
First things first: It’s every bit as gloriously nerdy as Superman. Within the opening minutes, we meet a household helper, comics-accurate robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., the Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser) and a super-ape who works for a character called The Red Ghost. And it all works.
What’s more striking, though, is that the character Galactus — who eats planets and wears a purple suit and helmet with weird triangles sticking out of it — is presented almost exactly as he appeared in the early 1960s Fantastic Four comics. And he’s genuinely scary.
A Deadpool-style movie could have scored cynical laughs with a character like Galactus — “haha, weren’t the old comics silly?” But no: First Steps goes all in, making one of the most outlandish looking Marvel villains to date also one of the most compelling. The film raises the stakes in a host of ways I won’t spoil, expect to say that it all works.
The Batman show of the 1960s went for camp both because of 1960s network TV budgets and because the producers wisely calculated that the show should laugh at itself to win over skeptical viewers.
Fantastic Four draws from a similar space-age, Mad Men, ’60s aesthetic — but everything looks luxuriant, elegant. Anything but campy.
It’s notable that First Steps feels as much like a team effort as Superman feels like a James Gunn film. Four people are credited with the screeplay — Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer — and Pearson, Kaplan, Springer and Kat Wood are credited for the story. They’re all under the assured guidance of director Matt Shakman, and everything Marvel is led by producer Kevin Feige.
Many Marvel films in recent years — and especially many Disney+ Marvel shows — have felt like the products of too many cooks. And to be honest, I expected that First Steps would be kind of a mess.
But no: Along with Superman, it’s one of the best comic-book movies I’ve ever seen. And the reason it succeeds is that the film seems so indebted to, and enamored with, the original comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the artist most responsible for the cool visual flair of the comics and now the film.
Fantastic Four is so geeked out over Kirby, in fact, that it sets its story in Earth 828 — a world named in tribute to Kirby’s birthday, August 28, 1917.
That’s nerdy. And that’s heart.
To kids reading comics, comics aren’t kitsch, they’re canonical — a source of hope and inspiration. Superman and Fantastic Four treat them with the respect they deserve.
Main image: Superman/Fantastic Four: First Steps. Warner Bros./Marvel