Box Office Back Issues: Historicizing the Liminal Superhero Films, 1989--2008
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Date
2021-04-27
Authors
Roman, Zachary
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Although the superhero film became a dominant force in Hollywood early in the 21st century, the formation of the superhero genre can be attributed to a relatively small temporal window beginning in 1989 and ending in 2008. This dissertation argues that a specific group of superhero films that I call the liminal superhero films (LSF) collectively served as the industrial body that organized and created a fully formed superhero genre. The LSF codified the superhero genre, but that was only possible due to several industrial elements at play before they arrived. An increasing industrial appetite for blockbusters coming out of the 1970s, the rise of proprietary intellectual property after the corporate conglomeration that occurred at the end of the 20th century, and finally, the ability of the LSF to mitigate risk (both real and perceived) all led to this cinematic confluence.The LSF streamlined the superhero genre through a mechanism I characterize as “generic pruning.” This is a process that indexes the modes, tropes, and production decisions that came to form the genre through years of formal, representational, and narrative trials. Although many LSF were critically panned, the experimentation that occurred in the liminal era aided Hollywood by informing it about the types of superhero films that would be produced and replicated, while also inculcating audiences as to the normed contours around a superhero film genre that had previously been illegible.
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Keywords
comic books, film, genre, liminal, media history, supeheroes