James Gunn discusses “lazy” superhero movies in comment that hopefully won’t come back to bite him
His next batch of superhero movies better not be lazy, or he'll fall into his own trap
James Gunn is one of the few filmmakers who managed to make multiple movies in the Marvel Studios machine that actually have creative fingerprints on them and he did it without everyone getting sick of him, which means the pressure must be pretty high for him to maintain that record now that he’s co-running DC Studios with producer Peter Safran. If the DC movies aren’t noticeably better than they used to be once stuff like Superman: Legacy starts coming out, then everyone’s going to pin the blame squarely on him (Safran will get off clean either way, because he’s not famous).
And now Gunn is potentially making things even harder on himself by going on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside Of You podcast (Rosenbaum has some superhero bonafides of his own, having playing Lex Luthor on Smallville and the Flash on Justice League Unlimited) and pointing out that some superhero movies are “really lazy.” Gunn says that some filmmakers take it for granted that superheroes are popular, saying they’ll decide to make a movie or a sequel without considering what makes that character’s story “special” or what “the heart of it” is.
It’s tough to argue with that at least, but Gunn went on to say that “there’s a lot of biff, pow, bam stuff happening in movies” where there’s no “rhyme or reason to what’s happening” in the third act. “I don’t care about the characters,” he added, “And they’ve gotten too generic.” That seems like a perfect opportunity to unfairly criticize some of his movies, but… The Suicide Squad and Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 had solid third acts. There was character development while they were fighting the starfish monster, and the end of Guardians was all a payoff to Rocket’s arc. Damn it, it actually seems like he knows what he’s talking about!
(By the way, despite hyping it up and all that, Gunn didn’t really have anything to do with The Flash.)
Gunn’s suggestion for fixing all of this is to try “very different genres” within the “superhero movie” umbrella. “I like very serious superhero movies,” he said, “and I like very comedic superhero movies. I like ones that are a murder mystery but it’s with superheroes. I like to see these different types of stories, as opposed to seeing the same story told over and over again.” He’s right, superhero movies are better when they branch out to other genres, but also where are these superhero murder mysteries he’s talking about? We’d like to see more of those.