Coming into 2016, I was very excited for the potential the year had, with what looked like a quality mix of major tentpole movies and quality dark horses the general audience wouldn’t see coming. In some respects, 2016 did reach good heights but one thing it never did was live up to the hype.

Deadpool

The underdog of the year in every single way, Deadpool started off the 2016 comic book movie season with a bang, a relatively low-budget small-scale bang, but a bang nonetheless. Heading into the start of 2016 if someone told me Deadpool would have received a Rotten Tomatoes score over 80% I would have laughed hysterically. The “Merc with a mouth” has held a place in my heart ever since I was fourteen but he’s never been a character to be taken seriously. Even in the comic book world he is an acquired taste, working best as alternative to the other men wearing capes. It was because of that fact that I thought he would fail to garner a response from movie audiences. Funnily enough it was because of this very reason that he was received so well. Instead of the low-budget trainwreck this movie threatened to be, audiences were greeted with the freshest take on superheroes since Kick Ass. Was Deadpool a classic? Not by a long shot, but he certainly put a new spin on what audiences expected to see, which was ultimately his secret weapon, especially in a year where superhero cinema fatigue finally hit an alarming level.

Batman Vs Superman

Polarising. That is what this movie is. Nine months on and both sides of this argument have only dug their heels in deeper. People who love this movie, absolutely LOVE it. People who don’t, wish they never have to sit through it again. Somewhere in the middle of all of that an “Ultimate Cut” version of the movie was released, which sought to fix a lot of the problems people had with the theatrical version. Does it succeed in doing so? It does for the most part but not enough to save the movie. There’s just too much wrong at the core of the movie, that it’s hard to pull it back from the brink. Though, I can see why a certain segment of the audience love it. Director Zack Snyder wanted to tell a very particular style of story and in choosing a style as earnest as he did, he opened himself up to criticism. There are troubling things at play around Batman vs Superman and the online fan wars that have continued in the months since. DC fans have called for the breakdown of Rotten Tomatoes because of its hand in awareness of poor review scores and the seeming bias of critics who prefer light-hearted Marvel movies. There’s no real logic to that argument though, seeing as we have had recent “dark” comic book movies see critical success such as X-Men: Days of Future Past and Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Is Batman Vs Superman a terrible movie? Not really. If the Ultimate Cut had been the one that reached theatres, the movie would have been remembered more fondly. As it stands now, Batman Vs Superman is cemented as ground zero for online fan arguments and that certainly proves one thing: if a movie has that many rabid fans it can’t be the poorly made dud reviews made it out to be. Well, at least the Ultimate Cut isn’t.

Captain America: Civil War

Civil War has had as close to the opposite life as Batman Vs Superman as you could possibly imagine. Released to rave reviews, a lot of fanfare and box office well into the billions, Civil War at one point looked like it was going to be a threat to The Dark Knight’s unofficial title of best movie based on a comic book ever. Upon it’s release, people thought it was a breath of fresh air compared to the dour BvS and it was seen as a shining example of comic book storytelling at its best. So that just leads me to one question: what happened to Civil War? I mean, no one really talks about it anymore. What once was spoken of as possibly being one of the best comic book movies is now just another stitch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s growing tapestry. That is the worrying part of Civil War. We are starting to really see the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe become so homogenised that a lot of their movies don’t stand out anymore. Civil War does have a lot of great moments and, if it weren’t for Deadpool, it would have been my favourite comic book movie of the year. Civil War really shone a light on the Marvel fatigue we are seeing. Though this was inevitable. Audiences will always love and loath movies in a cycle. Part of the reason Marvel movies were initially so popular was because they were a breath of fresh air from the more serious Nolan Bat-movies and the X-Men series. Now it is turning back again, where the audience seems to want movies with more serious tones, which left the year ripe to be stolen by a “dark” movie about a certain Egyptian mutant.

X-Men: Apocalypse

This movie hurt the most this year. Being an X-Men fan has always been hard. Every time it seems Fox can do no wrong with the X-franchise, they drop a dud. We were coming off two very successful X-movies in First Class and Days of Future Past and the time was perfect for Apocalypse to come along and give us the epic X-Men movie we’ve always been hoping for. What we got did not live up to the hype in the slightest. Apocalypse may have received higher reviews than BvS and Suicide Squad but it was by far the worst movie of the year for me. Taking one of the X-Men’s most iconic villains and turning him into a boring 2-dimensional character, who wastes more time pimping out his followers than showing character development, was not the movie I was hoping to sign up for. I think the failure here was entirely down to the script. There’s none of the magic that Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman brought to the previous two movies, which made the characters and setting feel vibrant and made you care about the plot. Here we are left to deal with a script by Simon Winberg, a writer who has yet to put his name to anything worth mentioning (outside of his work on Vaughan and Goldman’s Days of Future Past script), and it feels like a complete phone-in. It’s as if they broke the story in a day and Kinberg wrote the script in one sitting, with very little nuance or rewrites occurring after that. There’s just too much by-the-numbers here. It’s as if the movie was written fifteen years ago when comic book movies weren’t well respected and in the end we are faced with a movie that’s akin to the poor adaptations we get for video game movies. I guess us X-Men fans will need to go back to rock bottom, where expectations go to die.

Suicide Squad

Wow, was this not the savior of the DC movie universe that everyone thought it would be. There’s one feeling you get while watching Suicide Squad that is too strong to ignore: this movie feels like it has producer’s finger prints all over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were ten different versions of the movie floating around the editing studio at one point. It’s a shame, because somewhere deep down there was a good movie here, outside of Jared Leto’s poorly designed and written Joker. The trouble is the edit of the first hour of the movie is so all over the place that the audience is never given time to get invested in characters that were always going to be a hard sell to begin with. Just as you’re getting into one character’s story, the movie shifts and moves to another, at another time, and shoehorns in a ton of exposition to boot. It’s even got a villain so weak she makes Marvel’s villains look great, and that’s saying something. There’s just simply not enough to talk about here, as evidenced by the fact that DC fans decided to dig in their heels and go back to arguing BvS’s merits instead of championing their ragtag band of misfits. There could be hope for this franchise though, as it made enough money at the box office to surely justify a sequel, which could be well worth a look now that people are familiar with the characters. Let’s just hope they leave Leto’s Joker on the bench the next time.

Doctor Strange

With 2016 being mostly a disappointment, the time was perfect for Marvel to come along with another quirky character that fits their definition of the word “risk” and blow everyone’s mind, literally in this case. Doctor Strange didn’t live up to that opportunity. Is it a bad movie? Not at all, and in fact, it’s actually a very solid, enjoyable movie while you’re sitting in the movie theatre watching it. Once you’ve left however, there’s not a lot that makes the movie memorable. Doctor Strange was the first time I really felt like the Marvel formula was getting in its own way, and it was glaringly evident throughout. Essentially Doctor Strange feels too much like a re-skin of Iron Man using magic in place of metal. It takes a while to warm to Stephen Strange but we eventually get there and are treated to some incredible visuals along the way, but this was not the movie Marvel needed right now. It was certainly a good movie but not one that will be remembered for years to come or that will ever be considered high on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s list of best movies. Speaking of Marvel, they are in a bit of risky situation right now. People are seriously starting to push back on their more light-hearted style of comic book movie and their next two movies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-man: Homecoming, are two movies built to have humour at their core. They will really need Thor: Ragnorak to have a strong sense of edge to it or they risk hastening the fatigue the audience is strangling with. The truth is Ragnorak could go either way, as it plays up elements of Planet Hulk, a story with gladiatorial fights for the ages, and could be very serious indeed. The trouble is they hired Taika Waititi (a strong director in his own right) who has shown a great ability for comedy, and hardly the edgy director Marvel need to give them the more well-rounded universe that Doctor Strange failed to deliver on.

Overall 2016 was a disappointing year for comic book movies. It was a mix of weak or just plain bad movies that you wanted to forget and enjoyable movies that you struggled to remember for long. If someone had told me on the first of January this year that Deadpool would be the best comic book movie to grace our screens this year, I would have laughed it off (though my inner teenager would have jumped for joy). Maybe that’s where we are with comic book movies now. We just need someone to blow it all up and show us something completely new. At least 2017 looks to be a solid year. We may not see either Marvel or DC breaking from their mold just yet but at least we’ll be getting the best examples of their core values to date, in the form of Guardians/Spider-man and Justice League, respectively. Lets hope I’m not back here again this time next year, massively underwhelmed all over again.

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If you liked my review of this year’s comic book movies, why not check out my preview of What to Expect from Comic Book Movies in 2017, or follow me on twitter. Thanks.