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In A Year When Comic Book Movies Evolved, 'Justice League' Was 'Just' A Superhero Movie

This article is more than 6 years old.

Warner Bros.

We’ll know within the next two weeks as to whether Justice League is a disappointment or a disaster. Even if the reasons for its underwhelming debut are understandable in hindsight, it comes as a shock as the end of a year where comic book superhero movies had generally kicked butt. But then, they weren’t necessarily sold as comic book movies. The Zack Snyder/Joss Whedon DC Films sequel is the sixth live-action comic book superhero movie of 2017.

Heck, if you count comic book adaptations (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Manga adaptations (Ghost in the Shell), animated features (The LEGO Batman Movie), and bizarre supervillain origin stories (Split), that’s a whopping ten such movies in a single year, almost one per month. And here’s the weird thing: They were mostly pretty good.

Now, for the record, this doesn’t mean that I liked Spider-Man: Homecoming or Split as much as you did, or that you necessarily liked Ghost in the Shell or Justice League as much as I did. But overall, especially if we’re dealing with the straight-ahead DC/Marvel comic book superhero offerings that are often blamed for the downfall of the movie industry, well, those films were both relatively good and quite varied in terms of content, tone, genre and presentation.

As much as we might complain about the glut of superhero movies, and I think that’s really a complaint about the sheer amount of digital ink spent on each one in the years leading up to release, then we must also acknowledge something: In 2017, the comic book movies were (pending The Last Jedi) some of the best blockbusters of the year.

The year started with the deconstructionist comedy of The LEGO Batman Movie, which managed to spoof and pay loving tribute to the 78-year history of pop culture’s biggest comic book icon. The “Batman meets Robin” story took the best parts of Batman & Robin and the mile-a-minute lunacy of The LEGO Movie and offered what amounted to a character comedy about a bitter orphan fending off his fear of rejection and abandonment that also happened to be a Batman adventure.

James Mangold’s Logan was a “last Wolverine story” drama that wore its R-rating as a badge of honor, diving headfirst into the western/dying gunfighter sub-genre with dignity and grace. Whether you think the $620 million grosser is a masterwork or just a good movie, it’s a wholehearted genre embrace that represents the future of superhero cinema.

I wasn’t as crazy about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming as my peers, but they were well-made and well-acted movies that happened to contain story choices or character quirks I didn’t like. James Gunn’s sequel offered a look at a group of disaffected losers trying to figure out how to be a surrogate family despite having little experience with giving or receiving love, while Jon Watt’s Spidey reboot was a multicultural and character-driven high school coming-of-age comedy. If only they had let Peter Parker be a bit less of a threat or menace...

Both movies earned overwhelmingly positive reviews and had long theatrical legs to go with those huge openings ($146 million and $117m respectively) on the way to huge domestic ($389m and $334m) and worldwide ($863m and $879m) box office cumes. And what else can be said about Wonder Woman at this point that hasn’t said (by me among others) countless times?

The dynamite Patty Jenkins-directed adventure essentially gave DC Films a critical darling and, via Gal Gadot, a defining cinematic version of one of the most important DC characters around. It became the fifth-biggest grossing comic book superhero movie ever in North America (behind only Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight sequels and Joss Whedon’s Avengers movies) and the very biggest origin story/non-sequel comic book superhero movie of all time worldwide. Whether or not it gets any Oscar nominations or sets the course for a better DC Films, it was the movie of the moment for movie fans, superhero nerds and an entire populace beaten down by the drumbeat of everyday cruelty brought about by last year’s election results.

Marvel closed out their first year in which they had three movies and thus $2 billion in overall global box office with Thor: Ragnarok. Taika Waititi’s gonzo-goofy fantasy adventure amped up the already present self-aware humor of the first two Thor films (it’s not like Thor and Thor: The Dark World were Atom Egoyan movies) and delivered a cross between an early 1980’s Star Wars knock-off and a mega-budget 8-bit video game. And the film earned rave reviews along with (as of this writing) $738 million worldwide.

And finally, Zack Snyder’s Justice League was… fine? I enjoyed it on its shaggy-dog terms, even if I acknowledge that Spider-Man: Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 are better-made movies. And, ironically enough, it is that mere “It’s fine… I guess?” reaction that may well have doomed it.

This rundown is not even counting the superhero movies like Captain Underpants and Power Rangers, both of which were better than expected and yet not the start of new franchises. You can put those films alongside costly whiffs like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or The Mummy as biggies (Captain Underpants only cost $40 million) that tried to ape the superhero formula.

Yet, in 2017, the standard superhero formula pales in comparison to the genuine article, which has grown and evolved into something more eclectic. The relative failure of Justice League can partially be chalked up to it “just” being a conventional superhero actioner. Compared to the R-rated western, the high school comedy or the gonzo video game fantasy, the standard superhero template filtered through (mostly) unknown or disliked versions of iconic comic book characters wasn’t enough.

Ditto Martin Campbell's Green Lantern, which horrifically bombed against X-Men: First Class (a 1960’s spy caper) and Captain America (a World War II actioner) back in 2011. That Ryan Reynolds origin story was “just a superhero movie.” With the grandiose majesty of Batman v Superman and the Malick-ian realism of Man of Steel filtered out, Justice League became less like a true comic book movie of 2017 but rather like the failed franchise starters that attempted to make over existing IP into superhero adventures.

In a time when comic book superhero movies are released on the regular, the mere idea of being a big-budget superhero spectacular isn’t enough. “What else you got?,” audiences asked, and Justice League didn’t have anything else to offer. What might have been unique in 1995 or even 2007 made Justice League passé in 2017.

The comic book superhero sub-genre that began the year with The LEGO Batman Movie now closes the year with Justice League. And, personal preferences notwithstanding, this was arguably the year that the superhero movie took a natural evolution into essentially enhanced genre cinema.

Now that’s bad news for actual westerns like Blood Father and actual coming-of-age comedies like Edge of Seventeen and actual heist movies like and the like, as audiences who can get their genre fill via Spider-Man or X-Men movies are less likely to sample the genuine article in theaters. But the good news is that at least part of the reason comic book superhero movies kicked butt this year (decent reviews, solid openings, leggy runs) is because they were relatively good movies.

And in such a field, a comparative throwback like Justice League just couldn’t stand out from the pack.

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