Devotion to superheroes the cult of the film fanatic

Marvel’s latest movies may have bombed but these franchises tap into a quasi-religious fervour.

Brie Larson in a scene from The Marvels, one of the greatest box-office flops among one of the biggest movie franchises.

The idea that superhero films are getting worse will perplex film snobs. How can Ant-Man get worse? But it is so. The scepticism of critics has turned into something more like despair (“mostly meaningless” was the haunted judgment of The Times’s reviewer on Ant-Man’s most recent outing, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania).

More important, popular enthusiasm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the most profitable film franchise in history – appears to be sagging. Ant-Man and the Wasp was a flop. The Marvels (released last month) was a positive catastrophe, the worst-performing instalment of the MCU ever.

DC, Marvel’s rival, has failures this year, too: Shazam! Fury of the Gods and the unprepossessingly titled Blue Beetle.

Critics hail “superhero fatigue”. Highbrows fondly hope a chastened public has repented of its vulgar addiction to the entertainment franchise. After all, there have now been 33 Marvel films, 12 Star Wars films (plus nine TV series) and 11 Harry Potters in the franchise. Surely audiences yearn for new characters and new stories! It’s a compelling theory but ignores recent successes such as the seventh Mission: Impossible film and the fact that the franchise is a novel form of entertainment quite distinct from traditional cinema. It is not going away.

Here is the difference. An old-fashioned film, such as Brief Encounter, aims to entertain and perhaps move you. A franchise such as Marvel or Harry Potter aims to take over your entire life.

Franchises are not so much films as commercial religions. Devotees visit sacred sites (Platform 9¾, Disneyland, Marvel Studios). They join online forums to pore over the sacred texts with kabbalistic intensity. They purchase votive objects to display in their homes: wands, figurines, bedspreads.

Marvel has made more than $US40bn ($60.8bn) from merchandise; Harry Potter more than $US7bn. But more than entertainment and commercial gratification, fans seek identity, meaning and community. To a lot of people, “Which Hogwarts house are you?” or “Are you Marvel or DC?” are questions of existential urgency. Fans assemble online or in person at conventions.

Anybody who doubts the sincerity of these attachments should tweet that Harry Potter is rubbish and see what happens. Giorgia Meloni talks about the role of The Lord of the Rings in shaping her moral and political outlook in the way previous generations of Italian politicians once talked about the Roman Catholic Church.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the rise of franchise entertainment coincides with the decline of religion. The Harry Potter generation was the first that was really post-religious, for whom Bible stories no longer provided a common stock of characters and tales. But the disappearance of the Bible from the popular imagination does not imply the disappearance of the human need for shared stories that provide identity, community and values.

The most successful franchises take a strikingly religious view of morality. The traditional artistic virtues of moral complexity and ambiguity are replaced by a simpler, more reassuring message: good must overcome evil. Frodo v Sauron, Potter v Voldemort, Batman v the Joker. Harry Potter is strikingly Christ-like: a supernatural figure guided by a kindly old man with a white beard, he suffers death and resurrection before participating in a final apocalyptic battle against the forces of darkness (death, resurrection and apocalypse feature in Marvel and Lord of the Rings, too).

The point is not merely to entertain but to provide moral guidance. Marvel films are unashamedly didactic: “The weak man knows the value of strength and knows compassion”, “Sometimes one must break the rules in order to serve the greater good”, and so on. A distressing number of adults ask themselves “what would Dumbledore do?” when facing a moral dilemma.

Films are usually praised by critics for questioning social conventions but franchises tend to uphold the prevailing values of the time. Just as the romances of the Middle Ages taught chivalry, courtly love and Christian virtue, franchise films preach tolerance, hard work and (that pre-eminent theme of modern culture) the unlimited potential of the individual: an ordinary hobbit becomes a mythical hero, an ordinary boy becomes a magical wizard, an ordinary news reporter becomes Superman.

Those convinced “originality” must return underestimate the human yearning for the familiar. Repetition, not innovation, is the leitmotif of cultural history. Bible stories have been retold for centuries. Countless medieval poems deal with the adventures of the same small group of knights. Even Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based on “existing IP” (the story derives from 13th-century historian Saxo Grammaticus and had been retold many times before).

Modern franchises tap into an ancient notion of a story as communal property. It belongs not to the author but to the audience, who participate by dressing up as wizards and superheroes (just as medieval knights arrived at tournaments in the guise of Gawain or Lancelot), or by retelling and embellishing the stories in online “fan fictions” (just as medieval romances were elaborated and developed by bards in freezing castles).

Just as religions derive their potency from repetition and ritual, the recycling and rehashing of franchise stories exploits the power of the familiar: reinforcing a compelling sense of community, identity and shared moral values. This is a new and extraordinary influence for an entertainment brand to exert on our lives and our culture.

The Times