It’s debatable whether superhero fatigue is actually a thing, but one moviegoer has shared a pretty interesting take on the whole idea as they believe it to be responsible for the recent boom in horror movies.
For the past few years, it seems that audiences have been turning away from superhero movies. While a few gleaming examples have been able to cut through the dreaded fatigue with the genre, such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-man Across the Spider-Verse, it almost seems like a losing battle. As big-budget Marvel and DC films fall, another genre has seized the opportunity to rule the cinema. One Redditor explained their theory as to how horror is the antithesis of the superhero movie, being the opposite of what moviegoers are so bored of nowadays has given the genre a new lease of life.
“This was just a thought I had that came up when I was discussing The Flash with some friends […] I felt that it was emblematic of two trends in Hollywood filmmaking that dominated the 2010s but have increasingly come in for criticism and backlash since then: superhero blockbusters (and geek properties more broadly), and mega-franchises. And, I believe that the horror genre as it exists now repudiates both of those trends and many others that moviegoers have gotten burned out on”
Marvel is out, Michael Myers is in
The Redditor goes into a great deal of detail as to why superheroes just don’t have the same pull they used to. The answer is oversaturation and lack of quality control; as studios like Marvel have grown, the good-to-bad movie ratio has shifted to include more bad or average films.
It’s sort of like a Yin and Yang situation, we’re getting fewer Captain Americas and Supermen and more Halloweens and Stephen King films like The Boogeyman. While it sucks for Marvel, DC, and big-budget action movie fans in general, there is the bonus of getting to see more scary content being brought out on the big screen. On top of that, studios are starting to realize that horror can be made for cheap and pull in a massive profit which simply isn’t the case for a film like The Flash.
“horror is a generally low-budget genre. Grisly gore effects can be had for very little money compared to expensive CGI battle scenes, the main limits being the MPAA and the boundaries of good taste. Anything higher than $20-30 million is considered “big-budget”. It’s a business model that Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff pioneered and which Blumhouse and A24 have carried into the present”
But it’s not just down to budgets and Marvel movies being mid nowadays. In many ways, scary movies are the exact opposite of Superhero flicks. Even though movies like Ant-man and The Wasp: Quantumania and The Flash suck, we can at least be thankful to them for doing their part to bring back the horror genre.
