Joss Whedon comments on the current state of the superhero genre
Is the movie marketplace reaching its superheroic saturation point, or is the cinematic world of comic book adaptations just getting started?
You only have to look at Warner Bros. supposed list of superhero films that are scheduled to be released in the next few years, or Marvel’s slate of films— which goes up to 2021— to see both how lucrative and how ludicrous the superhero genre has become.
Here’s what Whedon had to say about the state of the superhero genre in a recent interview with the Huffington Post;
“People have made it very clear that they are fed up with movies where entire cities are destroyed, and then we celebrate.”
An outlandish comment considering how the first Avengers movie ended, but Whedon went on to say;
“Now, I watched ‘The Dark Knight’ and I thought of that as riffing on the genre. That was a superhero movie as ‘The Godfather.’ And I was like, ‘But I just still want to see a superhero movie!’ We had just gotten the technology to make it awesome, and I wasn’t ready to be post-modern about it yet.”
Whedon also commented on that delicate practice in his own work;
“You’re in a constant state of being pulled both ways at all times. You’re trying to make a populist film with fascist iconography that is just bigger, and better, and longer, and trying to break that down and find a weakness and humanity. People come in with a certain amount of emotional baggage. So, whether we’re in our larvae stage or our decadent stage, I can’t really say, but I try to make my superhero movies as if there’s either never been one or there’s only ever been them. I work with the idea that it’s just a natural way for people to be, so that you still make a movie about people.”
So according to Whedon, we can expect Avengers: Age of Ultron to feature motifs that deal with people and will have it's fair share of crowd pleasing moments but will ultimately have a heart to it's story. We will have to wait and see how Whedon's recent comments translates to his movie when it is released on the 1st May 2015.
