Spider-Man: No Way Home

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU CARE EVEN REMOTELY ABOUT MARVEL MOVIES AND HAVE NOT SEEN THE NEW SPIDER-MAN MOVIE.)

The new Spider-Man movie was released this week. It's an ambitious project. It combines 20 years of Spider-Man films, uniting the three film iterations of the character via multiversal shenanigans. It was a good movie, massive in scope and that scope still felt deserved.

When I watch these amazing Marvel movies (The last two Avengers were more ambitious.), I rue the wasted potential of Marvel's counterparts at DC. DC had Superman and Batman. They also had amazing stories which are undisputed classics. I hate that DC wasn't able to adapt these stories on film. Two decades ago, Marvel was bankrupt. The comics weren't doing well, no-one cared about characters other than the X-Men and Spider-Man. Why has Marvel done so much better than DC?

Marvel had vision, while DC didn't (and still does not). DC didn't know what to do with their characters, except for Batman. After Marvel released the first Avengers, DC were relegated to playing catch-up. They wanted to do a team up movie to rival the scale of Avengers, but none of it felt deserved. Marvel started small, built up momentum, waited things out before making their biggest plays. Thanos was built up for half a decade before they made him the main antagonist of a movie. Contrast that with DC, where there was no build-up. No patience! They adapted one of Superman's classic stories, The Death of Superman, before he even had a second solo movie.

Marvel trusts their source material and audience. When the first Avengers was released, even the craziest fans did not dream of a multiverse-spanning Spider-Man crossover with three different Spider-Men and villains from decades ago. You only found these kind of stories in comicbooks, they weren't meant for the less geeky audience of film. However, Marvel hasn't been afraid of leaning into this kind of stuff for years now. They're growing more confident with each success. Each success makes their ambition more deserved. I am very excited to see what they come up with in the future, it still feels like the beginning.

I should still note though, you can't just throw normal audiences into too much craziness in your first movie, you have to be patient and do the simpler things correctly first. The first Spider-Man movie was a simple Spider-Man tale fighting the Vulture. It hit the right beats for a new Spider-Man movie and made you care about the new Spider-Man.

DC started reasonably with Man of Steel, which was an okay movie, it had hints of not understanding the Superman character (Superman killing Zod is wildly out of character), but still left you hoping that maybe there were better things to come. The follow-up tried to do too many things too quickly. It introduced Batman, Lex Luthor, Doomsday and Wonder Woman. Each of these characters could stand on their own in individual films. It also adapted Death of Superman, which meant killing Superman in his second movie before he's had any real character development, and going into Justice League with a dead Superman that will need to be revived somehow.

This was all so rushed. I cared a lot about these characters, Superman is my favourite character in all fiction, but I still did not feel invested in these movies. If core fans don't care about your stuff, you can't even remotely expect normal people to. DC is still making the same mistakes. The upcoming Flash movie is overly complicated already, it has two Batmen, introduces Supergirl and wants to adapt Flashpoint but there is zero buildup to any of this.

I've always considered myself more of a DC fan than Marvel, the DC characters just resonate more with me. It's been disappointing to see these characters being at less than their best for years. However, I find a lot of comfort in the fact that Marvel has been elevating their characters in live-action for decades now. There is no Iron Man comic story better than the storyline for MCU Iron Man. I'm really looking forward to Marvel's future movies, and I hope they continue their brave venture into crazy comicbook territory. I also hope that DC finds their way somehow, but that looks very very improbable right now.