For the first time since 2011, we face a six-month gap in the release schedule for cape-wearing heroes. But what caused the slowdown, and is it a victory for ‘real’ cinema?
F
ed up with all those superhero movies cluttering up the multiplexes and forcing your delicate black-and-white Lithuanian goat-herding tragedy on to a single screen at 10am on a Tuesday? Angry, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, that a $300m CGI raccoon gets more screen time than the slow and haunting meditation on existential despair your favourite auteur spent a decade working on?
For you, then, the darkest days of comic book movie hegemony may be over. A quick peek at the theatrical release calendar suggests that there is not a single new major-studio superhero flick due to hit multiplexes in the next six months. That’s right, a full, blissful half a year – which hasn’t happened since May 2011. For years, the anti-comic-book brigade have insisted superhero movies are sucking the oxygen out of cinema and killing originality. Now, the great superhero drought of 2025 makes it look as though their side has finally prevailed. And maybe, after the best part of two decades of interchangeable third-act rubble fights and billionaire orphans growling about destiny, that’s as it should be.
