It’s hard being a fanboy these days. You can’t JUST enjoy a CBM anymore. You need to pick your loyalties, and justify your position at every turn. Apparently being a labeled a mere fanboy isn’t enough now; that’s just your Bachelor’s degree. You need a Master’s degree too these days, and the two popular one’s going around are ‘Marvel’ masters, and the ‘DC’ masters.
Then there are the specializations; The ‘FOX’ specializationand the ‘SONY’ specialization to name a few.
Let be honest, the fanboy community has never been forgiving, but let’s just take a step back and really look at where we stand today.
In my
last article I mentioned some ‘niggles’ with the MCU that I had. The point of the article was just to see the reactions it solicits, so I kept it vague. And even though I mentioned in the article’s header that I was nitpicking, I was labeled ‘DC fanboy’, ‘troll’, and ‘retard’.
There are a lot of trolls, and a lot of them know how to get the fan boys riled up. Take a dig at Avengers or The Dark Knight and the fanboys will be on you like piranhas. Why is that? Is it the demographic CBMs cater to? Or are fanboys of all ages just so passionate?
Today's typical fanboy like the Hulk. Peaceful, and even very intelligent when calm, but make him angry, and he can go absolutely beserk.
Hitchcock’s Vertigo is one of my favourite films, but I just don’t see myself writing a long comment articulating the brilliance of the film on a forum if someone posts ‘Vertigo suxxx’.
Back when I was in school, I read a lot about vampires and zombies. I watched a bunch of old movies on the genre too. Romero’s work with zombies still blows me away. This is before they became mainstream. Back when words like ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ weren’t cool.
It was great to see them become popular a couple of years later. It didn’t matter which studio was championing the cause, all that mattered was that the genre was having its day in the Sun. Why is it no longer possible to celebrate a new CBM as just that; a new CBM, rather than stating that DC is in the stone age compared to Marvel, or that Marvel isn’t pushing their films far enough?
The minute you utter the words “…The Dark Knight was better”, you’ve automatically enrolled yourself for the DC masters, and you don’t have a say. You’ve been handed a passport to the DC-nation, and in the world of CBMs there is no place for dual citizenship.
Think of DC and Marvel as Apple and Samsung. You may lean towards one or the other at different points of time, but it’s important for both to exist. Both have markedly different approaches regarding how they go about their products, and both work. While Apple seems to be going through somewhat of an identity crisis with its products, Samsung has no qualms about flooding the markets with product after product. Spot the similarities?
Monopolies just make the winner complacent, and that’s when the fanboys suffer the most. It’s important for the consumer that both exist in the same space, which in effect compels them to stay on the top of their game.
Marvelous Marvel
A movie, any movie, is a point in the ‘Quality v Business justification’ graph. It’s a balancing act between ensuring the quality of the film, but making sure at the same time it has the potential to be popular and relevant(a.k.a mainstream).
The MCU is the seminal set of points on this graph. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s true either doesn’t have a decent understanding of the way films work, or is grasping on straws to find reasons to hate Marvel. The MCU dwarfs Pixar’s streak of great films, and will stand as one of the greatest accomplishments in cinema history. But it’s not perfect.
It’s important for fans to critique (not just outright criticize) the studios decisions. It keeps the studios on their feet. There are some inherent flaws in setting up a Cinematic Universe this big, and while Marvel’s done an absolutely splendid job maintaining continuity across the board, some concerns are bound to crop up.
It’s no secret that each phase of Marvel’s films squarely focuses and builds up towards The Avengers. The individual films have to work together to create a consistent plot that weaves into, and build up the Avengers’ storylines. These individual films are pieces of thread that are all woven together to for the Avengers net. Given the constraints these films have to operate within, is it not possible that the quality could be slightly compromised?
From a business perspective, it’s genius. Absolute genius. And the crazy thing is that about 50% of the time even the individual films kick all sorts of ass! Iron Man, Thor: The Dark World and Winter Soldier were all really good films. Hell, Winter Soldier was almost inching towards Avengers in terms of how good I thought it was! But this bigger picture perspective doesn’t lend itself too kindly to films like First Avenger, and Iron Man 2.
Dark D.C
I’ve only ever backed 3 films produced by DC, and all for the same reason, that they’ve pushed narrative boundaries. Incidentally, most films from DC I haven’t enjoyed at all is for the same reason; they didn’t push those boundaries when they should have, and they had no clue what they were doing with the source material. Most people don’t agree with me that Watchmen and V for Vendetta were rubbish adaptation.
Batman’s has always been my favourite of the lot (clichéd, I know), and I’d watch a documentary on Kim and Kanye’s wedding if Chris Nolan directed it. Nonetheless, I felt TDKR was an extremely weak movie. It just felt like Nolan had no interest proof reading his screenplay for it before he shot it. Especially coming as a follow up to films like TDK and Inception, both having some of the tightest screenplays in the last decade. I was so disappointed in fact that I couldn’t even get myself to compile a list of all my gripes with the film (there are THAT many)
There’s no question that DC is still playing catch up. Its behind FOX and SONY in terms of the groundwork being laid down too. But they’re in a phase where it seems they want to concentrate at one movie at a time, and again, there both pros and cons to that.
Fin
SONY doesn’t look like they’re even trying with Spiderman anymore, and FOX’s
X MEN franchise has so many anachronisms it may as well be a T Rex roaming around the streets of LA.
So while I do prefer the DC lineup of characters, I am aware that Marvel is at least half a decade ahead of DC in the movie game. But since the fanboy Label maker has coloured me DC all over, I fear any cogent critiques I may come up with on the MCU will be washed away under the guise of DC fan boy-dom.
So is there any way today I could just be a fanboy? Without having a revered prefix attached to the coveted title?