On the surface it’s pretty rich for James Cameron to complain, as he did over the weekend, about Avengers fatigue, given that it now appears to be his one true goal to bury us in so many unnecessary Avatar sequels that we all end up gagging on them, begging for even the merest shred of leniency.
But then again, maybe the man has a point. You could argue that his description of the Marvel oeuvre as “hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process” isn’t entirely accurate. You could even argue that, a decade from now when the world’s oceans are clogged to bursting point with discarded Avatar 3 lunchboxes, we might find ourselves yearning for a return to the glory days of Iron Man 2. But, nevertheless, something rings true.
Specifically, it rings true right now. Avengers: Infinity War is days away, and it’s a near-certainty that it’ll break box office records all over the place. Along with a sequel due next year, the film is being sold as the culmination of a decade-long storyline that started all the way back with the first Iron Man film. If you watch Infinity War Parts 1 and 2, you’re going to watch the end of something. A sense of finality roars through the marketing, with the heavy suggestion that characters we’ve become familiar with will wind up dead.
And, if that really was the end, that would be terrific. If these Avengers films marked the definitive end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – if they were a great big full stop that tied everything up into a perfect satisfying bow – then it’d really be worth getting excited about. But they won’t be a full stop. They’ll be a comma, followed by more of the same.
This is where Avengers fatigue might kick in. Because rebuilding the cinematic universe after the events of Infinity War and its follow-up means making more origin stories. And, dear God, origin stories are the absolute living worst.
To my mind, two of the least successful Marvel films have been Ant-Man and Doctor Strange. And this is because we’ve had to go through the tedious cookie-cutter rigmarole of learning who these people are and how they came to get their skills. In a two-hour movie, at least a third of it is going to be handed over to pleasantries, and that can really punch a hole in your enjoyment. And we’ve got to go through this all over again with Captain Marvel, and lord knows how many other post-Infinity War films featuring new heroes. It’s wearying.
Happily, there are ways around it. Captain America: Civil War was smart enough to act as a soft origin story for Black Panther, using a handful of well-placed scenes to introduce the character among the melee of the rest of the film, so that when Black Panther proper came out, we were already more or less up to speed.
Better yet was what Marvel did with Spider-Man: Homecoming. That film was smart enough to realise that we’ve already been clattered over the head with Peter Parker’s origin story countless times before. There was no spider bite. No Uncle Ben. No lectures about power and responsibility. Instead, we were just flung into a fast, fun, goofy movie. And, as a result, Homecoming ranks as one of Marvel’s best.
Marvel would do well to remember this once all the 20th Century Fox properties land in its lap. We won’t want another retelling of how the Fantastic Four got their powers, or the history of enmity between Magneto and Professor X. That stuff has already been done to death. Instead, they should just hit the ground running. Start all the films in act two. We can catch up. We’ve had a decade of learning how this works.
If Marvel can do this after Infinity Wars 1 and 2, it might be able to stave off James Cameron’s dark warnings of fatigue. If it doesn’t, and we have to start all over again from the beginning, then there’ll be trouble. Not that we won’t watch the new Marvel films, of course. Given the choice of that or a glut of Avatar sequels, it’s an easy choice.
