Venom, Joker, and the year of supervillain cinema

Mark Millar’s limited series Wanted, loosely adapted in 2008 into an atrocious movie, imagined a dystopian world where all the superheroes are dead and the supervillains have won. That’s kind of how the multiplex feels right now. Comic-book cinema, which towered over the competition a mere five years ago (it reached its popular peak in 2019, the year of Avengers: Endgame and Joker), has entered a state of ongoing commercial decline. Capes and cowls are no longer a sure thing at the box office; increasingly, it feels like we’ve stepped into a post-superhero age. And in the absence of the virtuously costumed, it’s supervillains — and antiheroes — who have fought for dominance over the screens of 2024.

This weekend, for example, marks the theatrical return of Venom, the erstwhile Spider-Man arch-nemesis, again divorced of any relationship to Marvel’s friendly neighborhood web-slinger. Venom: The Last Dance, which just opened in theaters everywhere, rounds out a whole trilogy of starring vehicles for Tom Hardy’s take on hapless journalist Eddie Brock and the trash-talking, long-tongued extraterrestrial who’s made a home inside his bulky body. 

Need another fix of bad? The Last Dance arrives on the heels of Joker: Folie à Deux, the majorly underperforming musical sequel to Todd Phillips’ origin story for the most infamous madman from Batman’s gallery of rogues, the Clown Prince of Crime. And it anticipates another Sony spotlight for a Spidey foe, Kraven the Hunter, which is due this Christmas and belongs to the same weird, misbegotten franchise of Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man as the Venom series and this past spring’s baffling bit-player flop Madame Web. Hell, even the one bona fide comic-book-movie hit of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine, stars a character who began his fictional life as a villain, a quipping adversary of various X teams.

Not so long ago, any of these characters getting their very own movie would have been inconceivable. The mere existence of Kraven the Hunter is proof of how deeply Hollywood bought into the lie that anything Marvel- or DC-related could be a giant hit. Starring vehicles for supervillains feels like the natural next step (or maybe the last step, the point of termination) for a cash-cow genre that’s looked to back issues and more obscure corners of comicdom for available source material. You don’t get this year’s crop of bad-guy spectacles without the previous decade’s experiments in making second stringers into A-listers. There would likely be no Venom trilogy without the success of Guardians of the Galaxy or Suicide Squad.

To some extent, superhero cinema has worked back around to the ’90s, when the genre was basically Batman sequels and adaptations of cult comics like The Crow and Tank Girl and Judge Dredd. That was also the era when the big two publishers were lining up their own starring vehicles for the heavies of their respective universes. Again, Venom and Deadpool were both villains before they proved popular enough to get the antihero makeover, and to headline their own limited and ongoing series. In truth, this was always kind of a letdown. Venom, that slobbering rage monster, made for a pretty scary Spidey rival. Softening him into an “edgy” vigilante, a so-called “lethal enforcer,” was a waste of a good adversary.

This year’s unlikely supervillain movies suffer from a similar problem. They soften and brighten characters whose whole appeal was their rough edges and their darkness. The Venom movies are not without their pleasures, most of them courtesy of Hardy’s valiant effort to forge a screwball buddy comedy out of the symbiotic relationship between Eddie and his alien guest. But Venom has always been cooler as a villain, a vengeful anti-Spider-Man, and the movies never approach the fearsomeness that made him such a popular character in the first place. Imagine flashing back to 1988 and telling a reader that not only would Venom one day get his own trilogy of movies but that he’d be reduced to a one-man Midnight Run, a glorified mismatched-partner routine.

Likewise, Joker: Folie à Deux buys so fully into the idea that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a misunderstood misfit — destined for infamy only because he was abandoned by the system — that it leeches the character of all his psychotic power. You don’t have to be an incensed fanboy to recognize that turning the Joker into a pitiable sadsack is a delating approach to one of the most flavorfully outsized villains in all of comics. And if Deadpool has been a superhero for a lot longer than he was a supervillain, it’s still odd to see his trilogy of movies undercut their anarchic, sarcastic spirit with warm-and-fuzzies. Who was clamoring for a Deadpool with big feels? Are we really supposed to care about the crime-fighting dreams of a psychotic assassin who breaks the fourth wall at every opportunity?

The Venom and Joker films — along with Suicide Squad and Morbius and one must presume the forthcoming Kraven the Hunter — run into the same daunting obstacle, which is that it’s hard to build a conventional movie around characters that work best in opposition to the superhero, as a distorting mirror or foil or hurdle. All of them get around that problem by essentially turning their villains into more virtuous, upstanding, or even conflicted versions of themselves… which ends up violating what’s special about them. It’s actually hard to imagine a Venom or Joker movie that embraced the more twisted (or #twisted) aspects of either, because where would the rooting interest lie? You’d have something like The Fly or Natural Born Killers — which, no, that sounds pretty good, actually. What we got instead was de facto superhero movies in supervillain drag.

These films evoke the grimdark ’90s in another way, one that should be much less comforting for studio executives. That decade wasn’t just the era when comics were locked in an arms race of excessive edginess, with both Marvel and DC — along with Image, a publisher that was edginess all the time — pushing superheroes into the ethically cloudy arena of antiheroism. It was also a time of boom and bust for the comics industry, when an explosion of big sales and collector investment earlier in the decade lead to a rapid decline in interest, culminating in Marvel filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of 1996. Maybe superhero cinema is following a similar trajectory, sputtering out with a run of stories for the tortured bad boys of their roster. At the end of the parade, the rapscallions briefly take the spotlight.

But in the words of one of the genre’s biggest and best hits, maybe the night is darkest before the dawn. Which is to say, maybe there’s a glimmer of something brighter on the horizon, past these (mostly unsuccessful) flirtations with the dark side of the superhero industrial complex. The bad guys had their moment this year. Don’t be surprised if the medium’s most iconic character, a man who puts the super in superhero, kicks off a comeback for the good guys next year.

Venom: The Last Dance is now playing in theaters everywhere. Joker: Folie à Deux is playing in a dwindling number of theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.