This is what watching superhero movies for one week taught me
After realizing superhero movies are here to stay, I decided to give big screen adaptations of Marvel and DC characters a shot.
When it comes to comic book characters and both their big and small screen incarnations, I’ve never been a fangirl. Truthfully, I thought the whole comic/superhero movie genre was a fad, a trend, something people would abandon after a few years and move on to something else.
I also believed the same thing about jeggings, and apparently I’ve been wrong on both counts.
I didn’t just decide not to like these films. I will admit that I have only paid to see one on the big screen — The Dark Knight — but I’ve rented Spider-Man (the Tobey Maguire years) on DVD, streamed Jessica Jones or caught a random Thor here or there on cable and decided that trying to make sense of it all was an exercise in futility. So I gave them up cold turkey years ago (with a few sporadic and largely regrettable relapses).
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The enduring popularity of the DC and Marvel universes have passed me by. Then Black Panther earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and you couldn’t swing Loki’s Scepter for weeks without hitting someone raving about Avengers: Endgame. I had an epiphany: maybe it was time for me to dive back in and give superheroes another shot.
Where to start? Ideally, at the beginning, dating back to 2008’s Iron Man. Then it’s just a hop, skip, some 400 hours of my life (not including DC’s Extended Universe) and investing a huge chunk of my paltry salary to play catch up. This wasn’t going to happen, so I set a timeline of a week (give or take a few days) and decided I would only watch what I didn’t have to purchase or rent.
Since one can’t live on Captain America alone, especially when The Bachelorette and The Handmaid’s Tale are in full swing (I’ll admit to sneaking some Real Housewives in there as well just to keep my sanity). But I figured as long as I binge watched as many superhero movies as I could stomach into the shortest amount of time possible, well, close enough.
I hit up some pals– one who has been reading comics since high school — with some mad knowledge when it comes to comics and filled in the blanks with the help of Wikipedia and YouTube. Not ideal, I know, but a girl needs to improvise. I got some tips on which movies I could skip and which are must sees (I didn’t entirely heed this advice). What follows is an accurate account of my journey into the latex vortex.