A Cure For Superhero Movie Fatigue: Stop Turning Solo Movies Into Team Movies

After watching the dreadful The Marvels, the less dreadful Blue Beetle, the muddled Flash, uninspired Shazam 2, and hearing about this Madame Web movie, I thought:  why are they trying to make every solo movie into a team movie?  I suppose a lot of it is the success of the Avengers franchise.  But the problem is that good team movies are hard to do.  Good solo movies (or almost solo) are much easier.

Especially with The Marvels, Wakanda Forever, and Madame Web there was this thing where the studio really wanted to push "girl power" with a bunch of female heroes.  It's like despite the success of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, the studios didn't think a single female superhero could hold her own so they needed a bunch of extra characters.  Or maybe they thought that audiences wanted something bigger.

But as someone who literally wrote a Girl Power team-up, I can tell you that team stories have some inherent problems versus a solo story.  The simple fact is there's only so much story time (whether on screen or on paper) and it's hard to give everyone an equal share of time.  So you end up focusing on one or two characters more than others. (Besides superhero movies this was also the issue in every Star Trek movie ever.)  In Girl Power for instance the Batman character of Midnight Spectre gets the most story time--because she's Batman!  I think the Flash character might get the next most and then the Aquaman character and then the Superman character.  Really I continue to think the Superman character got short-changed, and as I've said before, this is a reason she got a big subplot in the next story.

Anyway, the point being that even in a team you're always going to have a couple of characters who get more focus than others.  Even in sports this is largely true.  There really isn't a team that's completely made up of stars.  You have a few stars and then you have "role players."  Like in football the quarterback is your star and then you have a few prominent playmakers like a running back, wide receiver, or tight end and then you have those other guys like the offensive linemen no one cares about despite how vital they are.  Probably the closest you had to an equal team was the 2004 Pistons who won the championship from the star-studded Lakers despite not having any big stars of their own; it was pretty much a whole team of "role players."

Still, the point is when you're writing a story (a book or movie) the more "main" characters you have, the harder it is to give them all time.  The problem then with something like The Marvels is it tries to develop three characters but pretty much fails to do anything with anyone.  Or a movie like The Flash that's supposed to be a solo movie but then jams in a bunch of extra characters (Batfleck, Keaton Batman, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, younger Barry Allen) which makes it hard to focus on the title character.  Or Ant-Man 3 where you have Ant-Man, Wasp, his daughter, and Wasp's parents basically as a team, whereas in the first movie it was mostly just Ant-Man and the second one it was aptly titled Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Or a movie like Blue Beetle where for some reason they decided to basically make it a team movie by having his whole family plus Ted Kord's daughter assisting him, again making it hard to focus on the main character.  That Madame Web movie sounds like basically the same thing where there are all these extra characters to take focus away from the supposed main character.

Superhero movies that have worked in the last few years are pretty much the ones that don't do this like The Batman and Shang-Chi.  (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is the exception.)  In The Batman you have Batman and Selina Kyle and then role players like Lieutenant Gordon and Alfred.  In Shang-Chi you have him and Awkwafina and then some role players.  Or even in Joker you have Arthur Fleck and then some support characters.

The science here basically says you have a main character, a nearly-main character (usually doubling as the love interest), and your role players.  Even look at the original Star Wars:  you have Luke as your mainest character and then Leia and then Han is more of a role player in that he doesn't get a lot of background or anything; he's just the scoundrel who develops a conscience.  And then you have your other role players in Chewie, Ben Kenobi, and the droids.  It's still a two or two-and-a-half situation and that allows the story to work.

Contrasting to Girl Power, the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series starts out focusing on primarily Emma Earl as she finds the armor and becomes a hero.  Then there are the role players:  Becky, Dan, Lieutenant Donovan, Percival Graves, and the witches.  In the full version some of those role players got a little more time, but in the version that went out first a lot of that got cut and so it mostly keeps a tight focus on Emma.  Then over the next seven books those role players get some more time.  Some are killed off and new ones are added as well.  But it probably wouldn't have worked if I'd tried to jam a couple more heroes in there and made it Tales of the Scarlet Knights.

Anyway, the point being if Hollywood still wants to make superhero movies, stop trying to jam a bunch of excess characters in there.  One or two main characters are all you should have unless it is a team like the Fantastic Four or X-Men.  That is generally how "the MCU" started.  I mean Iron Man just had Iron Man and his supporting cast.  Thor just had Thor and supporting characters.  And so on.  It was only after those first five movies that they did the big team-up.  Then it mattered less if there wasn't a lot of character development because the characters had already been developed somewhat in their own movies.

Point being, solo movies should be solo movies--or nearly so.  Getting back to that will make the movies stronger and then maybe people will want to watch them again.  I'm not that optimistic about the new Superman movie since they announced it'll have Guy Gardner, Hawkgirl, and others in it.  Sounds like the new boss isn't much different from the old boss.

(PS:  This actually demonstrates another reason why pure Marxist theology never works.  Everyone--including you and me--thinks they are the star of the show.  No one thinks they are just a role player.  But pure Marxist communism only works if everyone accepts being literally a role player as in they do their role.  No more, no less.  In the real world, just about everyone will think they're the star of the team and thus they should get more.  In sports you often sees what happens when someone thinks they should be making more:  the team has to cut back in other areas to compensate or else the player goes somewhere else and then the team has to replace him.  Either option usually weakens the team, which is a reason why it's so hard to win championships year after year.)