Even though certain 20th-century superhero movies were successful and iconic, we’ve come a long way from the days of Batman: The Movie and Superman: The Movie. Back then, the idea of major blockbusters based on comic book characters was an unproven gamble, but since the late 1990s and into the 21st century, superheroes burst into the mainstream with Blade, X-Men, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, and the entirety of the MCU – each one further entrenching us into a moviegoing landscape inextricable from the cultural dominance of the superhero. Even now, as we approach critical mass and conversations about “superhero fatigue” become more and more prevalent, we still can’t make it through a calendar year without at least a couple of costumed adventurers soaring through theaters to the tune of millions of dollars.
In the early days, these movies were far more willing to bend comic book lore to the will of the screenwriter and director – the original Blade screenplay from David S. Goyer, rewrote the character’s origins — created by Marv Wolfman — to be set in America instead of London, a change that quickly made its way to the page, and many other superhero films took their own liberties with the source material as well. But now that the genre has become one of the most prevalent in Hollywood, these franchises have started plumbing the depths of canon with more intentionality, directly adapting iconic storylines and using that sense of “accuracy” as a key part of the marketing…a strategy that has earned mixed results. In the case of this year’s Supergirl, a movie currently being met with middling reviews and a disappointing start to its box office run, part of the criticism has been a lack of fidelity to the Woman of Tomorrow storyline that it’s predominantly based on. But here’s the thing: This criticism could’ve been avoided wholesale if the DCU hadn’t made that adaptational choice such a major factor in the writing and promotion of the movie.
