Comic Book Movies Are Actually Horror Movies

The mammoth multi-movie mall near me has 17 screens but usually shows about a dozen different movies, since hit movies require two or three screens for ticket-hungry audiences. The biggest hit movies are usually based on comic book characters or themes that might be in comic books if they were still being published.

Oops. I just checked and comic books are still being published. Newspapers are struggling to survive, but apparently comic books are doing just fine.

On the web page of my town’s mammoth multi-movie mall (Marcus moniker), the listing of current movies has each title helpfully followed by the movie’s general category. Here’s a typical listing of those categories:

ACTION/ADVENTURE
ANIMATION
ACTION/ADVENTURE
HORROR
FANTASY
SUSPENSE/THRILLER
COMEDY
FANTASY
HORROR
SUSPENSE/THRILLER
ANIMATION
ACTION/ADVENTURE

If you’re trying to navigate around the large, murky sea of dopey cinema, you might try that one “COMEDY” movie and hope to enjoy a bit of well-crafted comic entertainment. Good luck. Most likely you’ll get something dreary and humorless like a Sarah Silverman movie. Similarly, the occasional movie categorized as “DRAMA” might star that actor who’s made a career out of hyperventilating, that movie providing less substantive drama than giving your dog a bath.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Repeated though they are, you’d think those six categories would at least indicate good breadth of subjects. But often, especially in summer and during winter holiday season, many of the movies through most of those categories are variations on comic book themes. Comic books. Comic books.

Maybe someone could explain the never-ending, ever-expanding domination of comic book movies, perhaps also explaining the never-ending, ever-expanding cinematic pandering to adult children. On second thought, no, please don’t try to explain this. An explanation would probably be depressing, like an explanation for the Grammies giving out awards for aggressively bad music.

Sorry if that seems intemperate. I’m just baffled by the critical and popular adoration of movies based on comic book characters or any gaga fantasy that appeals to 12-year-old boys fixated on their computers. Of course, it’s been common knowledge since the 1970s that Hollywood’s primary target audience has been the 12-year-old boy. Who has also become wired into that sensibility? Movie critics, many of them, apparently, virtual 12-year-old boys.

Rotten Tomatoes, the most influential movie review website, collects reviews from a broad base of movie critics, averaging their grades for its “Tomatometer” score. Of the 16 Batman-based movies Hollywood has gifted us over the years, three were released from 2005 to 2012. Their Tomatometer ratings were, in order, 85, 94, and 87 — each above 60 so “Certified Fresh.” These Batman movies, then, were judged by adult critics to be worthwhile for moviegoers to see (whether the movie-goers are actual adolescents or just long-malingering adolescents).

Also generally worthwhile, according to our movie critics: many other action / adventure movies (even ones lacking the aesthetic virtue of cartoon characters) that feature cars racing around, bullets flying and things blowing up. The merit of these movies? Many critics believe they are rewardingly glossy entertainment, no less rewarding for having been fashioned to appeal to computer-tethered 12-year-olds and the eternal 12-year-old in today’s vast population of post-literate moviegoers.

Four years ago I tried to peer through the critical fog of a Tomatometer rating for a movie that seemed possibly worth watching. “Woman In Gold” was a 2015 historically-based drama chronicling the experiences of a Jewish Viennese woman, later emigrated to America, whose family had been torn apart and robbed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. That robbery included the famous painting by Gustav Klimt “Woman In Gold.” 

I won’t recapitulate the movie here or try to describe the power and integrity of its narrative. But I’ll note that I was lucky enough to see it at a theater in the company of a 91-year-old friend of mine, Martha, who had miraculously survived Auschwitz along with her mother, though her father was, as were millions of other innocent souls sent to the camps, murdered there. My friend loved this noble, moving, realistic movie and did not shrink at its tragic context. Martha, a quietly noble yet funny and insightful woman, had learned long ago to look clear-eyed at the world’s hemispheres of good and evil.

What Tomatometer rating would you guess “Woman In Gold” received? Many critics breezily dismissed the movie as pat and predictable, as if the movie’s depiction of this family history or maybe even the outcome of World War II should have been a dramatic surprise. (“Oh, please! As a sophisticated film critic, I know how World War II ended.”)

Just to establish a contemporary quality benchmark: The Batman movie released before “Woman In Gold” received a  “Certified Fresh” 87. 

The 2015 consensus of movie critics on “Woman In Gold” was a “Rotten” 53 (since raised to 57 — enlightenment).

One shortcoming that might have figured into this movie’s low rating: Apparently it wasn’t released in 3-D.

How do you account for the sustained popularity of lavishly childish movies based on comic book characters? Maybe comic book movies are actually horror movies. What’s horrifying is not obvious, but it’s sitting in darkened movie theaters everywhere: large audiences and many critics who have grown decreasingly willing or able to deal with complex source material such as thoughtful books or other scripts with characters who are non-super human beings. They find the creative terrain of comic books more rewarding.

Anyway, enjoy the movies. I expect that a compelling Batman and Superman v. Godzilla will soon be released. It will be easy to see, showing on multiple screens at your local mammoth multi-movie mall. But if you miss it, don’t worry. Just wait for Batman and Superman v. Godzilla II.