For a long while, there had seemed an endless appetite for superhero stories, crowds rushing to and cheering at exhaustively interconnected adventures of good v evil even as critics started to sour. But in the last year, that bad taste has slowly spread, underwhelming box office showing that there is in fact a limit to how many capes and crusaders audiences can tolerate.
The combined US box office of Black Adam, Shazam 2, Morbius, The Flash and Ant Man 3 couldn’t even rival what the last Spider-Man made in its entire run, the scraping of the superhero barrel loud enough to repel even the most invested of fans. It’s been a particularly rough time for DC (its Batgirl film was canned before it was even finished), rough enough for an entirely new direction to be instated, ushered in by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. But before his universe comes to be (his first offering will be something we all definitely need: another Superman reboot), there are a couple of stragglers, the first of which arrives weighted down by another kind of expectation.
