Anyone taking a cursory glance at the movies released in a given year can tell you that the popularity of certain genres tends to come and go in waves. A few decades ago, people liked cowboy movies or hard-boiled detective stories. After that it was Star Wars rip-offs, then supernatural teen romances. These days, it’s obviously all about superhero movies, but is it possible that the superhero genre is on the way out? A recent video from The Nerdwriter hints that it might be, using Logan and Hugh Jackman’s history in the X-Men series to illustrate what happens to a movie genre when it gets old.
The video does this by relating Logan to the changes that the Western genre went through over the years, hitting on some of the film’s more overt metaphors in the process—Logan having to fight an evil version of himself seems like an on-the-nose nod to plenty of larger ideas, especially regarding what the evil Logan does to Xavier. In the end, though, Logan seems to be less about how the superhero genre is dying, and more about why the superhero genre is important to people in the first place.