Ranting On...Tom Holland and the Comic Book Yawn

All right, I'm out.  Not of the closet (did that eleven years ago), but out of the comic book movie game.  For those who haven't heard (and trust me, if you haven't heard about it, you will), Tom Holland has officially been cast as the new Spider-Man, taking over the role that has been donned recently (extremely recently) by the likes of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, and we will get a third reboot of the series a decade after Maguire, which means we've had three Spider-Mans in less than a decade.

I get that this isn't the first time that such a recasting has taken place in such a short window (James Bond in the 1970's, Batman in the 1990's), but those were franchises that still elicited excitement-does anyone really want another Spider-Man movie?  Honestly-the only two that were any good were the first two, and those were a decade ago.  Since then we had the bloated (albeit INSANELY successful Spider-Man 3), and the two installments with Andrew Garfield, who was badly miscast for the role of a young twentysomething and oddly completely botched his career at the time, going from near Oscar nominee to someone who is fired for the kid in The Impossible (he better hope the public likes Martin Scorsese's upcoming Silence).  Let's be honest here, the Spider-Man brand is badly botched, and it might not recover without a serious amount of TLC similar to what Christopher Nolan did to the Batman movies which doesn't seem to be something that Marvel has learned to employ quite yet (and at least then they had the decency to wait seven years).

Overall, though, I'm really tired of the comic book genre right now.  There have been a few strong installments in the past ten years, chiefly The Dark Knight, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain America: Winter Soldier, but they've become too over-saturated.  This was evidenced by The Avengers: Age of Ultron this past year, a gigantic miss by the filmmakers with too many characters, too much repetition, and a badly-neutered main villain.  All-in-all, the only ways that comic book films seem of interest now is the way that they launch new stars (Chris Evans and Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth...all the Chris's) and occasionally make us laugh (Guardians of the Galaxy was a big hit not because it was a great film but because it skewered itself a bit in hopes of gaining new fans to the genre).  The films need to find some sort of newness, some sort of artistry, some sort of risk.

This is what made Captain America: The Winter Soldier so mesmerizing.  I'm convinced that this is destined to be the best Marvel adaptation, period, as it actually has intense, sometimes new and challenging action scenes and let's the characters do the talking.  The film doesn't rely on "OMG-it's a cameo by such-and-such," but instead simply on heroes that are trying to find some semblance of purpose in their lives and a villain that doesn't seem comically evil, but genuinely like someone we might encounter in real life.  This hasn't been there in any of the recent Spider-Man movies, and quite frankly is lacking from the recent massive hit The Avengers.

I say these things not to be a grandpa or a douche-y guy complaining at a Comic Con panel, but because Hollywood has too much invested in comic book adaptations to not be able to succeed without them at this point.  Destroying tent poles while they aren't creating new ones is a bad way to go about things.  There's only so many franchises that you can sink before you eventually run out and have to create new stories, and only the James Cameron's and JJ Abrams' of the world seem intent on doing that (wouldn't you die if Steven Spielberg made a film like Minority Report or AI again instead of just another prestige historical drama-something with risk and edge on it?).  Marvel and DC both are at the point where they are exhausting their characters (lest we forget, DC may well have done itself in with relaunching the Batman franchise so quickly after Christian Bale with pop culture punching bag Ben Affleck, a move pretty much guaranteed to falter).  Why not go with a different sort of comic book adaptation-one that's less visually impressive but has a more complex story?  Or creating a film from the vantage of the love interest rather than the hero?  Something to keep the films fresh and new, rather than just repetitive.  Because I'm starting to get the same feeling I had when big-budget action movies started to continually be panned, and then eventually started to bomb, at the Box Office in the 1990's-if you give out garbage and ubiquity year-after-year, people will want a new flavor.