Hollywood’s not afraid of superheroes anymore, but it’s still afraid of real superhero stories

Before superhero movies were the only kind of movies, they almost always had a cute little gag where someone would acknowledge that something—typically something pulled straight from the comic book source material—was silly, whether it was by directly breaking the fourth wall or with a winky meta gag. That way the audience wouldn’t feel embarrassed about watching a superhero movie, because the movie had announced that it was okay to think it was embarrassing. The most iconic example is in the first X-Men movie, when Wolverine objects to everyone wearing matching leather costumes and Cyclops quips: “What would you prefer? Yellow spandex?” (a nod to Wolverine’s costume in the comics).

Modern superhero movies no longer waste time with that, with Marvel Studios’ latest release—The Marvels—basically being the ultimate expression of how Hollywood’s feelings toward superheroes have evolved. It’s a movie where everyone unabashedly wears a superhero suit, where everyone’s backstory is explained in a different thing, and where ill-defined superpowers that involve energy blasts and energy absorption are just accepted as cool. There’s no point in undercutting any of that, because nobody’s going to the theater to see The Marvels if they’re not already on board.

It’s been a long time since Hollywood has been embarrassed by superheroes. The movies make money. They’re popular. Marvel can make a movie called The Marvels and people generally understand what that means. However, Hollywood is still significantly ashamed of the actual source material—comic books—that these superheroes come from.

The Marvels is also an example of this, though not the most egregious one. After all, its three eponymous Marvels have different origins than their comics counterparts. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is better served by her movie origin, which isn’t dependent on a man, like her comics one. But fans of the comics version of Monica Rambeau might be disappointed that Teyonah Parris’ version doesn’t get any credit for being the first woman to use the Captain Marvel name or for having a legacy all her own. Then there’s Ms. Marvel, the one and only breakout star of Marvel Comics’ push to make the Inhumans matter at all, but Iman Vellani’s live-action version is implied to be a mutant in the MCU—at least partially because Marvel Studios wisely avoided the Inhumans, save for one failed TV project—and her powers were changed for her TV show.

More obvious examples can be rattled off easily: The Infinity Gauntlet story in the comics is completely different from how it plays out in Infinity War (which was the name of another completely different story) and Endgame. The bones of Civil War are there in the movie, but the comic had a whole thing about picking sides and competing philosophies about superheroism that all had their defenders (even if Captain America was obviously right in both of them). Or take any of the MCU Spider-Man movies, which have all been epic crossovers where Spidey meets another hero and faces increasingly gigantic stakes, as opposed to 90 percent of Spidey comics, where he’s just trying to juggle his Daily Bugle gig and his relationship with Mary Jane, and then maybe the Rhino will trash a bank if you’re lucky.

It’s the same with the Flash movie across the aisle, which was heavily indebted to the Flashpoint comics event, in a sense, even though that’s just one Flash story in nearly seven decades of Flash history and this was the very first movie all about the Flash. Like Spider-Man, most comics about the Flash tend to be about him battling one of the many classic Flash villains like Mirror Master or Weather Wizard, not Superman’s General Zod, but a regular story about the Flash—any story from that long history—simply isn’t big enough for Hollywood to justify the huge financial demands put on a mega-budget superhero movie.