When will the superhero movie era end?

I know there are many of you out there in movie fan land who wish for superhero movies to burn.

As phase five of the MCU begins and James Gunn and his team get to work on a new DC strategy some of you are dreaming a different dream.

You want their capes to be torn from their backs and their smiling goofy faces to be brought down from the heavens.

Brothers and sisters I have good news. I believe that will happen. And I even have a date for you. Place it on your calendars in glorious anticipation.

I predict the superhero movie will no longer be a relevant force at the box office in the Year of our Lord 2052.

Now, before I explain how I arrived at this number let’s chat a bit about box office numbers, movie trends, and two of my favorite Hollywood creatives.

I forgot a bunch of things in my post on screenwriter William Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Here’s one of the gems: Hollywood is a gold rush business. When the powers that be see something is successful they mimic it.

There is now a generation that doesn’t remember a world before the superhero ruled the box office. But take it from your elders, in the before times what ran the table had no more depth than the superhero movie.

I lived through the Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger action era. That was followed by a million sequels and rip-offs of Die Hard. And what came after the Die Hard rip-offs were mostly Tarantino wannabes and failed attempts to be the next Scream.

It was always better back then, no matter when back then happened to be.

Case in point: In the early 1980s Goldman was lamenting the direction of Hollywood. His gripe?

All the sequels. Those pesky kids Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were gonna ruin everything with all their special effects-driven sequels.

Star Wars was going to have 8 sequels! They were going to keep pumping out Indiana Jones movies.

And the studio heads, who once upon a time would make two or three movies just for love of the game were tying up all their budgets to keep up with what Goldman described as ugly, naked cash grabs. Sequels are movies made by (ahem) prostitutes, Goldman wrote.

To his credit, Goldman admitted he was as guilty of this as anybody. After all, he signed off on a prequel to his biggest hit: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

‘Oh, but it hasn’t always been this way,’ you might lament to yourself. Let me point out something else I found interesting. This comes from Quintin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. The book focuses almost exclusively on the 1970s and mostly on the grimy, pulpy, violent crime and revenge dramas that Tarantino loved.

What caught my attention was something he wrote about Stallone’s Rocky.

When Rocky came out movie audiences had lived through years of cynical 70s movies where the hero always failed and the closest they ever got to “winning” was by killing a whole bunch of bad guys on their way out the door.

Tarantino recalled someone (his mom maybe?) seeing the trailer for Rocky and lamenting, “oh it’s just another movie about a man and his problems.”

Tarantino said audiences today just can’t understand how happy movie crowds were when the match started and Rocky knocked down Apollo Creed. They roared! And he didn’t even win the match. But still, it was so different from what they were used to that everyone went home happy and the movie was a massive hit.

Which is to say, that yes, crowds will one day turn their backs on superheroes just as they once abandoned disaster movies and musicals and tough-guy revenge flicks. One day they will find something else to love. I’m hoping for more Mel Brooksian comedies.

So, when will this happen?

Here’s my figuring on the subject. Say what you will about the quality of these films — and you say a lot — the MCU is the most astonishingly successful (franchise, shared universe, collection of sequels) movie series in the history of cinema.

The only thing that comes close to it? The Western. So how long did Westerns rule the roost? I’m gonna peg it at 40 years. The 1930s to the 1960s featured straightforward westerns that dominated movies and then television. The sun began to set in the late 1960s. But starting in the mid-60s we had a decade of revisionist westerns where Goldman, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and others questioned the values of their father’s movies.

You could argue that the western continued far after that. Dirty Harry is just a cowboy in the city after all. And of course, Yellowstone is a lot of things but it’s core is the cowboy myth. Which would mean on television at least, the Western is back.

But for clarities sake let’s call it 40 years.

So if you say that the superhero dominance really began with Avengers in 2012 that gives us till 2052 for this thing to run it’s course.

At that point, I’m guessing movie audiences will be swept away with a new movie trend: Surgeons in Space? Nursing home romances? You scoff but it’s been done. Twice.

Or maybe they’ll do westerns again.

Of course, Ant-Man Quantumania could bomb. And maybe everything else Marvel and DC releases for the next few years bombs too. Maybe this will be wiped away by 2025.

It’s Hollywood man. Nobody knows anything.