Good to be bad – why supervil­lains are here to stay

Sui­cide Squad arrives this week sur­round­ed by a cer­tain amount of mys­tique and an awful lot of hype. Mar­got Robbie’s Harley Quinn already has all the mak­ings of a fan favourite, while Jared Leto has every­one intrigued as to his inter­pre­ta­tion of The Jok­er. And then of course there’s Will Smith. After so many years of watch­ing caped cru­saders resolv­ing to do what’s right, now we have a rogue’s gallery of bad guys forced to unite against an even more dead­ly force. But how did we get here, and could the cur­rent exis­ten­tial cri­sis super­hero movies are fac­ing have a last­ing impact on the genre?

Com­ic-book adap­ta­tions seem to be approach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point as evi­denced in the under-per­for­mance of two of the year’s biggest releas­es, Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice and X‑Men: Apoc­a­lypse. With world­wide gross­es of $800m and $500m respec­tive­ly, nei­ther could exact­ly be called a flop, but in anoth­er con­text those num­bers become less impres­sive: Apocalypse’s gross was down $200m on its pre­de­ces­sor, Days of Future Past, while the first big screen show­down between Bat­man and Super­man made around $300m less than Cap­tain Amer­i­ca and Iron Man’s third meet­ing in Civ­il War. Crit­i­cal and pub­lic reac­tion has also indi­cat­ed that big names and spec­ta­cle are no longer enough.

So far we have seen that there is a lot to be done with char­ac­ters bound by a moral code or, more per­ti­nent­ly for stu­dios, at the cen­tre of a mass mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Yet over time fans have grown weary at the lack of riski­er com­ic-book adap­ta­tions. Hugh Jackman’s 16-year, eight-film tenure as Wolver­ine has been ham­pered by a need to main­tain a fam­i­ly-friend­ly rat­ing, mak­ing the vio­lent anti­hero hard­er to faith­ful­ly achieve on film. Sim­i­lar­ly, both Jon Favreau and Shane Black have com­ment­ed that Iron Man’s most infa­mous print sto­ry, the alco­holism themed ​‘Demon in a Bot­tle’, will like­ly nev­er be adapt­ed out­right sim­ply because Mar­vel are mind­ful of attract­ing young audiences.

The result is, beyond the odd cen­sor per­mit­ted F‑bomb, sani­tised super­heroes who, even when they fight, do so blood­less­ly and with care­ful­ly rea­soned moral argu­ments. Dawn of Justice’s super smack­down came to a quite baf­fling cli­max, and as excit­ing as the feud between the two head Avengers was, Marvel’s ten­den­cy to announce mul­ti­ple films in advance made it clear that no one was ever real­ly going to suf­fer from this brief fall out.

Are audi­ences sim­ply grow­ing tired of good guys? The mas­sive suc­cess of Marvel’s R‑rated Dead­pool would sug­gest as much. Audi­ences respond­ed to this vul­gar anti­hero pro­tag­o­nist in record-break­ing num­bers, crush­ing the per­ceived wis­dom that super­hero films have to appeal to all in order to suc­ceed. Sui­cide Squad will be hop­ing to take that one step fur­ther, free­ing audi­ences from the moral quan­daries, ter­ror­ism metaphors, and weighty issues of oth­er recent tent­pole releas­es. The punchy trail­ers have promised lev­i­ty (some­thing Dawn of Jus­tice sore­ly lacked), and we now know that, as the sur­prise suc­cess of Ant-Man proved last year, a lit­tle fun and mis­chief goes a long way.

It’s worth not­ing that some of Mar­vel and DC’s most endur­ing char­ac­ters have not always played by the rules – Heath Ledger’s Jok­er wor­shipped at the altar of chaos, while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki near­ly destroyed the world out of sheer spite. In ever-expand­ing uni­vers­es, it makes per­fect sense to give these char­ac­ters cen­tre stage.

Despite the ini­tial neg­a­tive wave of reviews, in Sui­cide Squad DC could yet have its first over­achiev­er, and before long we could see the world of super­hero movies skew towards more vil­lain­ous sen­si­bil­i­ties and bad guy spin-offs. Tom Holland’s Spi­der-Man may soon find him­self com­pet­ing for the spot­light with Ven­om and The Sin­is­ter Six; Cat­woman could com­mand an edgi­er solo out­ing; and Loki might final­ly be able to step out of his brother’s shadow.

Of course, finan­cial suc­cess is the arbiter of any stu­dio fran­chise, but qual­i­ty also mat­ters. While com­ic-book adap­ta­tions remain the most pop­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic genre, there are only so many times heroes can be reboot­ed, repack­aged and reassem­bled before a fresh direc­tion is need­ed. The task ahead of Sui­cide Squad, and films like it, is to con­vince us that it real­ly is good to be bad.