Is The Suicide Squad the beginning of the end for the superhero movie? | The Guardian

Marvel’s crescendoing epic Avengers: Endgame, with its colossal box office showing two years ago, will undoubtedly represent the peak of the superhero movie’s popularity. The Suicide Squad meanwhile may prove to be to the superhero movie what The Wild Bunch was to the western: a bloody, game-changing end to one phase, and the beginning of another, even richer one.

I have no interest in seeing the Suicide Squad and frankly, it saddens me to see yet a new low in profanity and gore in superhero movies. I wonder when we’ll reach the bottom. The author of the piece, Brogan Morris, seems to believe the new self-aware and perhaps even self-effacing superhero movie may bring more complexity along with the grit. I don’t welcome this new phase but if it does, as Morris seems to believe, represent the last phase of superhero movies before the genre fades away, I can accept it as such.

I have to question, though. Is it even possible that we can get away from pure spectacle and back to more modest mid-budget movies again?