5) Be Adventurous
Much has been said about the potential for superhero fatigue in the current craze for comic book movies. Such masters of cinema as Steven Spielberg have predicted that, sooner or later, the superhero movie will “go the way of the western.” The best way to avoid the death of the genre then is for the studios to keep trying fresh, adventurous ideas. If every superhero movie that comes out feels different from the last, then audiences aren’t going to grow bored.
The two superhero movies released by Fox in 2016 perfectly sum up the virtues of being different and the failures of lazily going with the same old thing. Deadpool could have been a risky move from the studio, as it was unlike anything they had produced in their X-Men franchise before. Plus, it was R-Rated – cutting off the lucrative family market. Yet, because the studio backed it and the production team believed in their movie, Deadpool was a welcome breath of fresh, foul-mouthed air. The movie-going public thought so too, and it made a shedload of money on the back of a relatively small budget.
On the other hand, Fox put out X-Men: Apocalypse later in the year. The sixth mainline X-Men movie and the fourth from director Bryan Singer, the minds behind Apocalypse assumed that offering up much the same thing that we’ve been watching for several films now – Professor X and Magneto’s on/off-again friendship, the X-Mansion getting attacked, rogue students going into battle, etc. – would suffice. Oh, and they threw in a two-dimensional uber-baddie in an attempt to up the stakes. The result was a movie that was met with a collective shrug. After Apocalypse, the future of the X-Men series is in question (especially with Hugh Jackman calling it quits).
What we do know, however, is that there will be many more Deadpool sequels.
