When you first look at the failure of Kraven over the weekend, you come to a rather obvious conclusion. Yet another dumb-looking comic book movie crashes at the box office. Duh!
But if you look closer, there’s a bigger lesson to be learned here and it boils down to character. You see, one of the reasons that the comic book world took over the movie business was because it had 75 years to test which of its characters worked and which didn’t.
Therefore, when it came time to make movies out of these characters, Hollywood knew which ones to choose. Batman. Spider-Man. Superman. Iron Man. Captain America. Wonder Woman. Thor. Wolverine.
Once you moved into the lesser-known characters, audience interest dipped. If not at first, then eventually. From Blue Beetle to Madame Web to The Flash to Black Widow to Aquaman to Captain Marvel to Shazam to The Eternals to, now, Kraven.
You see, characters either work or they don’t. You can’t, all of a sudden, make a faulty character work. There is something embedded in their character DNA that prevents them from becoming a character you can build a feature-sized story around.
This is no different from when you sit down and write your own scripts. If you don’t have a character that works, the movie isn’t going to work. Which is why I tell writers, it’s more important to get the main character right than it is to get the plot right. Cause audiences will follow a strong character through a weak story. But they will not do the opposite. They will not follow a weak character through a strong story. There are, like five examples in all of history of the latter. Whereas there are thousands of examples of the former.
Now, I didn’t see Kraven. I would hope that you didn’t either. I would not wish even five minutes of the film on my worst enemy. But I read a few reviews and a common theme kept popping up. Which was that it wasn’t clear what Kraven’s powers were. Clarity isn’t just crucial to a superhero working. It’s crucial to any character working.
Just like I need to know what Kraven’s main powers are, I need to understand what Moana’s fatal flaw is. I need to know why, Tyler, in the movie Twisters, is so committed to chasing tornadoes. I need to know what makes Glinda, in Wicked, tick.
The quickest way to write a weak character is to make them vague. And since powers are so integral to superheroes, those powers must be clear. If they are not, I guarantee you the movie won’t work. It’s why everyone caught up with how weak of a character Captain Marvel was. What were her powers? Does anybody know? How bout Black Widow? I still couldn’t tell you if she even had powers!
Some of you may point out that Deadpool wasn’t a runaway hit in the comic book space. Or Black Panther. Or The Guardians. Yet they all did well as movies. Except each of those movies came out at a time when the Marvel name alone got people into theaters. Let’s not forget that Captain Boring Marvel somehow made a billion dollars.
But as time has gone on, audiences need more from these characters. And these secondary superhero peeps aren’t delivering. Which is yet another reminder to solidify your main character above everything. Are they easy to root for (Superman)? Are they sympathetic (Wonder Woman)? Are they likable (Spider-Man)? Are they charming (Iron Man)? Do they say things in funny ways (Deadpool)? Do they have a strong conflict holding them back in life that they must overcome (Wolverine)? Do they have a compelling backstory that informs who they are (Batman)?
You don’t need all of these things for every character you write. But you want as many of them as possible.
I think both Marvel and DC understand this now. Unfortunately, they’ve already had some movies in the pipeline that they couldn’t stop by the time they figured this out. Which is why we’re getting the fake Captain America movie in February. Why we’re getting Thunderbolts at the beginning of the summer.
Then you have the wildcard that is Fantastic Four, a property that’s never worked in the feature format. I know comic geeks are going to hate to hear this because the film does have some buzzy casting going for it. But I think it’s going to bomb just like the other FF4s.
From there, we do get James Gunn’s new Superman as well as a second Robert Pattinson Batman movie. Those are the cornerstone comic book characters so they should do well. But it’s possible that Marvel and DC have fostered so much ill will that people might not show up for those either.
This all goes back to that last Spider-Man movie, which I told you, at the time, was a dangerous path to take. Once you admit that one Spider-Man isn’t enough and that you need three in order to bring audiences in, then what do you think audiences are going to say when you go back to one Spider-Man? Same deal with Deadpool & Wolverine. How do you go back to just Deadpool now?
Moving on to the world of non-superheroes, I tried to check out Netflix’s “Carry-On” last night. I’m torn about this movie. On the one hand, I love the “spec script” nature of the story. It’s such a 90s idea. It has this fun contained setup. Shades of when the Phone Booth spec sold for a million bucks.
But the thing with scripts like this is that they must be plotted religiously due to the fact that the setup – a TSA agent must allow a bag to go through the machine unchecked – is delicate. It’s one of those setups where, the more you think about it, the more you realize how flimsy it is. So, every time a major plot point comes up, such as a character dying, it must make sense or that doubt the audience already had turns into full-fledged disbelief.
For example, about 30 minutes into Carry-On, our bad guy covertly kills another TSA agent. Yet TSA just keeps checking bags. There’s no pause to the service. I mean, come on. Airports have been known to clear everyone outside the building if they spot a single abandoned bag. Yet they don’t pause a second after one of the TSA guys mysteriously has a heart attack and dies?
Another thing I didn’t like about the concept was that it was built around a negative. I never like concepts that are built around negatives because negatives don’t give your hero anything to do. Ethan, our TSA agent, his whole task in this is TO NOT DO ANYTHING. He’s supposed to let the bag go through. That felt backwards to me and started the story off in a weak way.
But I stayed with the movie for a while. Until it moved outside the TSA setting. At one point we’re in the middle of this sorta-cool car chase with two secondary characters and I was thinking to myself, “How did we get from a contained thriller to a full-out action film?” It didn’t feel right so I found my focus drifting more and more until I was barely paying attention.
But look, I don’t begrudge the writers or the director because these movies are deceptively hard to write. Story-wise, the script wants to stay within its setup (the TSA location). But I know what it’s like to write with that restriction. You always think there’s not enough plot there so you’re tempted to go outside of the location. And while you might technically make your plot more exciting by doing so, you also risk betraying the very concept that pulled the audience in in the first place.
I’m not going to lie. I’m struggling to find good writing lately. It’s why I’ve been delving into these holes in my cinematic history. I just started watching this 1980 movie called The Stunt Man about a criminal on the run who hides out by becoming a stuntman on a local movie production.
It’s such a weird movie that it has to be seen to be believed. At times it feels like a sophisticated anti-war satire and other times it feels like the director just made up scenes on the fly that day. But the main reason to see it is that it actually puts actors in real danger in some of these action scenes.
There’s this helicopter chase scene on a bridge. A real helicopter is dipping under this bridge that isn’t very high off the ground and you’re thinking, “That could’ve easily resulted in a crash.” And it has a real effect on the viewer. I could feel tension in action scenes that I don’t feel anymore.
For example, in Red One, there’s this snow-speeder chase through the North Pole and it was so clear that not a single frame was shot in any real location that I never once felt tension or worry. When you watch movies like The Stunt Man, that isn’t the case. There was even this scene where the main actor was on the edge of a rooftop overlooking a steep hill and you’re thinking, “He could really fall and die here.” And it was NOT a secure roof by any means. The actors kept slipping during their dialogue.
Now if we could just mix up real locations like that with good storytelling, we could get a lot of people back into the theaters.
What did you watch this weekend? Anything good?
