The Superhero Blockbuster
The Superhero Blockbuster
Adaptation, Style, and Meaning
The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning builds an innovative framework for analyzing one of the most prominent genres in twenty-first-century Hollywood. In combining theories of adaptation with close textual analysis, James C. Taylor provides a set of analytical tools with which to undertake nuanced exploration of superhero blockbusters’ meanings. This deep understanding of the films attends to historical, sociopolitical, and industrial contexts and also illuminates key ways in which the superhero genre has contributed to the development of the Hollywood blockbuster.
Each chapter focuses on a different superhero or superhero team, covering some of the most popular superhero blockbusters based on DC and Marvel superheroes. The chapters cover different aspects of the films’ adaptive practices, exploring the adaptation of stylistic strategies, narrative models, and modes of seriality from superhero comic books, while being attentive to the ways in which the films engage with the wider networks of texts in various media that comprise a given superhero franchise. Chapter one looks back to the first superhero blockbuster, 1978’s Superman: The Movie, examining its cinematic re-envisioning of the quintessential superhero and role in establishing Hollywood’s emerging model of blockbuster filmmaking. Subsequent chapters analyze the twenty-first-century boom in superhero blockbusters and examine digital imaging and nostalgia in Spider-Man films, Marvel Studios’ adaptation of a shared universe model of seriality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the use of alternate timeline narratives in X-Men films. The book concludes by turning its analytical toolkit to analysis of DC Studios’ cinematic universe, the DC Extended Universe.
Throughout The Superhero Blockbuster, Taylor engages the relevant discourses beyond his primary engine, successfully intersecting a wide and diverse array of scholarship that grapples with everything from the study of CGI aesthetics, urban spatiality and political ideology, nostalgia, and others with nuance and care. This is top shelf.
James C. Taylor is a teaching fellow in film and television studies at the University of Warwick. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, as well as the anthology Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes, published by University Press of Mississippi. His research interests include adaptation, comics, Hollywood cinema, digital imaging, media franchising, and film seriality.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Superhero Blockbusters as Adaptations
Chapter 1. Truth, Justice, and the Cinematic Way: Superman: The Movie, the First Superhero Blockbuster
Chapter 2. Digital Power and Moral Responsibility: Spider-Man and the Marvel Superhero in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 3. Earth’s Mightiest Superhero Blockbusters: Networked Seriality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Chapter 4. The Strangest Continuity of All: Alternate Timelines in Fox’s X-Men Films
Conclusion: Crisis on the DC Extended Universe
Notes
Bibliography
Index
