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I've been thinking about the dichotomy in success rate between Marvel and DC movies, and with Avengers: Endgame coming out thought I'd roll out one (of many) possibilities. The DC characters, coming out of the 40s/50s and WW2, are for the most part authority figures....
...Batman is essentially a cop, Green Lantern is an interstellar cop, Flash is a cop/scientist, Superman is fundamentally a cop, Hawkman is a cop...you get the idea. Marvel came into its own in the anti-authoritarian 60s, so Sub-Mariner, Hulk and Thor answer to nobody....
...Spidey is a kid the authorities would like to have a word with, the X-Men are on the fringe of society, again, you get the point.
Authority figures tend to do very well in TV because when you're home, you want to know that your world is secure, the house is safe, and....
Authority figures tend to do very well in TV because when you're home, you want to know that your world is secure, the house is safe, and....
...someone is watching out for you. This is why cop, lawyer, and hospital shows do well. By contrast, movies do not tend (speaking generally) to favor authority figures. You don't see many hospital, lawyer or straightforward cop movies (unless s/he is a renegade)....
...which is rather the point. We go to movies to escape the sense that during the day we are caught in a machine and answerable to others. We go to see anti-authority figures doing the sorts of things we'd like to do. TV shows, though a bit more challenging now, are...
...again more structured, more about reassuring viewers. So the DC properties tend to do well on TV but falter with a movie audience because they're everyone's dad or otherwise authority figures. The Marvel characters (Spidey, Deadpool, X-Men) fit better with movies....
...because they're not authoritarian for the most part. (The government even broke up Avengers.) Where Marvel has been smart on the TV side is by integrating anti-authoritarian figures with traditional TV cop settings, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage being good examples...
...of threading that narrative needle. Anyway, just throwing the idea out there for discussion since it seems to have some surface validity.
