Thank goodness for Fantastic Four! By now, we can all agree the general consensus of this movie, is that an utter fail in every way. Sure, some of you may think it's not as bad as people say, and some of you might actually like it(we all have guilty pleasures). But the one thing we can all agree on is that it was not a good movie, and 20th Century Fox really dropped the ball on this one. And while some have begun preaching the comicbook fatigue apocalypse is upon us, this movie can provided a lot of valuable lessons moving forward. This is of course assuming the 2016 movie slate is an overall success.
What Fantastic Flop has shown us is how bad comicbook movies can be, and how much can go wrong. We are honestly spoiled when it comes to the genre, and this movie is a reminder that we shouldn't take it for granted. Last year, we had Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Winter Soldier (on TV we had Daredevil and Flash). Those movies were all different, and very well recieved, showing us how great comicbook movies can be. Go a little further back and we have The Dark Knight, Iron Man, First Class, and The Avengers. Those movies have defined the superhero genre to what it is today, and now that we've seen that you can consistently make good comicbook movies, we the audience expect that. What's worse, is that every time there's a good comicbook movie, we expect it to be better then the last. We debate Marvel vs DC, how characters are suppose to be portrayed, humor vs darkness, how close to the source material must it be, and anything possible. Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel have to be 2 of the most polarizing movies because you either love it, or flame it every chance you get. And while some of us are extremely bitter about the Mandarin, and Superman not saving people, they were still decent movies in comparison to Fantastic Four and Green Lantern.
Age of Ultron is the most recent victim of the superhero Microscope. The only movie we could compare it to is the Avengers so it has so much to live up to that it's almost unfair. Age of Ultron did so many things right. We had great action set pieces, awesome character moments, great humor and drama, fantastic CGI, had to make up for Hawkeye, while introducing Ultron and Vision, keeping the Twins an integral part of the movie, while balancing the other Avenger's screen time, while raising the stakes, and setting up for Civil War, and Infinity War. Do we realize what this movie had to do and the hype that came along with it? When you think about it, the fact that this movie isn't an utter mess is unbelievable.
But why does this movie get so much hate? Because our expectations set a bar that's almost impossible to meet. It's like being disappointed in every crime drama because it's not pulp fiction, comparing every Pixar feature to Toys Story, or every war movie to Saving Private Ryan. In no other genre is this level of competitiveness so extreme. The complaints include:"Age of Ultron is good, but it's not better then the Avengers" or "The Dark Knight Rises sucks, the Dark Knight is the best batman movie of all time" and the newest one "Ant-Man was funny, but Guardians did it better". I don't think anyone is going to Creed thinking it has to be better then the Rocky Movies or leaving Straight outta Compton because it's no Citizen Cane. That would be ridiculous!
Next year we have Age of Apocalypse, Civil War, and Dawn of Justice coming out and the hype for these movies is almost unreal. But if they're anywhere less then Days of Future Past, The Dark Knight, or Avengers, we'll use that against them. These movies will hopefully in their own right be great but just because it doesn't meet your unreal expectations doesn't take away anything from them. It may be 2015 but CBM are not immune to being dreadful. So hopefully now we can lower that bar just a little and start judging super hero movies for what they are instead of what we want them to be. Because no matter what happens, we can rest comfortably knowing... They're going to be better then Fantastic Four!