Could Animation Be Superhero Content’s Best Liferaft?
After years of wishful thinking by critics, the long-awaited “superhero fatigue” narrative started to become a reality by 2023.
There have still been exceptions to the idea, of course. Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine was a box office success last summer, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did well in 2023. But there have been far more misses than hits across both Marvel and DC’s releases, both critically and financially, over the last few years.
The issue with Thunderbolts*, which performed well with audiences and critics but still lost money, has potentially sparked a new round of concerns for the superhero industrial complex: After years of producing content around pretty much every character, the “big two” superhero IP machines are finding the appetite isn’t endless for hero shows and movies (spurring another “MCU reckoning” piece on Thursday in Variety.
For Marvel, the article posits, the in-house solution may be leaning more heavily into known commodities and sure things. As it highlights, the future movie slate — as limited as it may be at this point — is leaning on Avengers and (co-produced with Sony) Spider-Man titles for now. The remaining live-action Disney+ shows for release like Ironheart, Wonder Man and Vision Quest feel more like the last vestiges of a previous Marvel approach.
At DC, with its CW era of TV-making closed, the focus has been more measured with well-received titles like The Penguin and Peacemaker. But its own live-action series plans for HBO and HBO Max seem like a conservative approach, with Lanterns (based on the Green Lantern Corps. collection of characters) set for 2026 and TBD series like Booster Gold, Waller and Paradise Lost potentially sitting in the wings.
Compared to the peak of the so-called superhero era, when both Marvel and DC were seemingly cranking out show and movie after show and movie, this feels like a step back. On the other hand, it may also just be a recalculation around how to get the most out of the still-valuable IP both have on their hands, by going the animation route instead.
For older viewers, animation can sometimes play to a smaller audience, but you could argue that Marvel and DC properties stopped catering to wider audiences long ago as movies and TV shows got further steeped in lore while collective popular culture absorbed their characters and stories.
If there’s less focus on a big tent anyway, animation potentially presents an opportunity to embrace that for a lower cost than a live-action movie, and in a way that can seemingly battle the apparent fatigue around hero stories in the bigger scheme.
That doesn’t mean either comics giant is abandoning these stories or characters. Instead, they may just be utilizing them differently, to reduce costs, prevent gen-pop audience burnout, and for the MCU, even get out of some of the boxes the single-universe approach may have caged it into.
For instance: DC has seven different active animated shows, plus Bat-Fam coming out this year, and four more shows in production including the Mister Miracle show announced on Thursday, with acclaimed comic writer Tom King as showrunner, fittingly, since it will be based on the limited series he co-created with Mitch Gerads.
Even as someone that keeps up with this sort of content pretty steadily, I can tell you that despite what could be as many as 11(!) DC animated programs next year, it doesn’t feel like there’s too much content around these characters. Which is the point here, and what DC and Marvel are likely betting on.
Marvel, for its part, is making some similar moves.
Animated shows like X-Men ‘97 and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man were some of the best-received Marvel content of the last few years, cost less than cinematic risks like Thunderbolts*, and as a best-case for Disney, help drive and/or retain streaming subscriptions.
Those two shows both have season two in the works already, while Eyes of Wakanda and Marvel Zombies will air their debut seasons this year. Disney also has kid-focused animated shows around Spider-Man and now Iron Man as well that are not related to the larger continuity but get younger audiences hooked on the characters early while imparting some early-life education in the process.
This isn’t to say that DC or Marvel will be stepping back entirely from blockbuster movie attempts (Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps will both be released in theaters next month, after all). But if audiences truly aren’t showing up to films like that the way they once were, animation does feel like a way for those studios to regroup instead of completely retreating, while figuring out how to adjust to a marketplace that doesn’t print box office dollars for it the way it previously did.
