BY CHRIS VOLZKE (’17)

Super hero movies are currently all the rage. Over the last 16 years’ super hero movies have taken over the box office, dominating over every other kind of movie. Since the year 2000 there have been 88 super hero affiliated movies that have been released into theaters. With an average run time of about 2 hours, that is 176 hours of movie.

Now those kinds of stats would be exciting to the super hero fan in me. However, it may be possible that the market is becoming saturated with super hero movies and one day they may come to an end.

It seems that every year, the most anticipated film of the year is the next big super hero film. Whether it’s a huge well known group of super heroes, like in “Captain America: Civil War” or “Batman V. Superman“, or just a solo film, like “Doctor Strange“, people become obsessed with these movies and they are the most anticipated films of the year. These are the films that bring in the big money for the production companies, like Disney who payed $4,000,000,000 for Marvel. They drive the market for movies and control the market. But are these the movies that people should be the most excited for?

There are movies that come out every year that truly are much better than the big super hero movies that over shadow them, but a lot of people miss out on them because they decide to go see the new Marvel movie. Last March the highly anticipated hero film “Batman V Superman” was released at the same time as a much smaller film “10 Cloverfield Lane“. Zach Snyder’s retelling of the classic super hero story was critically a flop but it still raked in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office just because it was massively marketed and highly anticipated. Even though critics hated it and fans were very torn by it, it still made almost $900,000,000.

“10 Cloverfield Lane” is an original story produced by science fiction mastermind J.J. Abrams and directed by first-time director Dan Tratchenberg. It received wide critical acclaim but many people passed over it due to when it was released. It brought in a little over $100,000,000 which is by no means bad, especially when the films budget was only $15,000,000. But doesn’t a movie that is genuinely very well made and critically loved deserve to make more than a super hero movie that a lot of people really didn’t like very much?

In defense of super hero movies, many of them are very well made and critically loved. Big budget hero flicks like “Guardians of the Galaxy“, “The Dark Knight“, and “Captain America: Civil War”, were all loved by fans and critics alive. Many would even argue that “The Dark Knight” is one of the greatest films ever made. But the success of these movies have given way for much poorer hero flicks to be huge success in the box office.

There have been many super hero movies that are so hard to watch because they are absolutely terrible. “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance“, the sequel to another critically hated hero flick and financially successful movie “Ghost Rider“, is among the worst rated movies of all time, yet it still made more than $130,000,000 at the box office. It made even more money than a super hero movie that came out at the same time, “Chronicle“. “Chronicle” was critically loved and still made quite a bit of money, but it didn’t have that Marvel logo on it so people weren’t as excited to see it.

People continue to flock to the movies to catch the latest big budget super hero movie no matter how bad of a movie it may be, while films that are genuinely much better get passed Eventually the trend is going to change. At some point people are going to stop paying to see mediocre portrayals of their favorite comic book hero, and spend their money on the good movies that are actually worth their money. But until that time we can expect to see several more mediocre hero flicks that make a large chunks of cash at the box office.