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Well, Super Bowl LIX has come and gone. And for movie fans who tune into the game for the debuting trailers as much as for the football, there was a wide assortment of titles to enjoy…even if they seemed to fall into just four categories. There were live-action remakes/reboots of kids’ animated films (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch, Smurfs); the latest installments of action franchises (Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning); new action movies hoping to start franchises (F1, Novocaine), and just one superhero entry (Thunderbolts*).
Somewhat surprisingly, the summer’s two biggest comic book pictures–each of which released much-talked-about teaser announcements earlier this year–didn’t try to capitalize on their buzz with longer previews during the Big Game. For the time being, the tantalizingly brief glimpses we’ve gotten for Warner/DC Studios’ Superman and Disney/Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps are pretty much all we have to go on.
The two movies have more in common that just their four-color roots. Both are revamps of two of their respective companies’ oldest and most highly regarded properties. Both seem to be avoiding the trope of detailing their heroes’ origins and are instead showing them already established in their worlds. Both have lovable pets (Superman’s dog Krypto) or mascots (The Fantastic Four’s robot H.E.R.B.I.E.) ready to steal the show. And, frankly, both studios are looking to jumpstart interest in their respective cinematic universes after some recent box office missteps (the less said about the DCEU’s Justice League and The Flash or Marvel Phase Five’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, the better).
The other common denominator between the would-be July blockbusters is a shared theme of optimism. Superman director James Gunn has said that he wants his version of the Man of Steel to be a global beacon of hope (That giant “S” on Kal-El’s chest has long been described as representing hope in the language of his Kryptonian homeworld). And as the quartet that began the Marvel Age of Comics back in 1961, the Fantastic Four of First Steps hope to capture the family dynamic of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s early adventures in a way that the two previous depictions–three if you count the never-released 1994 Roger Corman production–didn’t (the fourth one, and the most successful to date, was of course Pixar’s The Incredibles).
As a silver-haired Silver Age geek who has spent way too many years–and dollars–collecting comics, I have to say that each of these teasers got me looking forward to July, when I’ll be able to take my grandnephews and grandniece to see the films. I may have some fanboy quibbles about minor details, most of which seem to revolve around hair (Krypto looks a little too shaggy, as does John Malkovich in his cameo, and why does Pedro Pascal remind me more of Thomas Dewey than Reed Richards?). Still, here’s hoping that the critics who were predicting the demise of “superhero cinema” the last year or two are wrong in these cases.
Have you watched the Superman and Fantastic Four trailers? And if so, are you excited for the films, or do you think the comic book genre is tapped out? Let us know your opinions in the comments below. Excelsior!