Originally published at: Please stop comparing Superhero films to Westerns | Boing Boing
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I dunno is it about how they are both dominant genres at periods of time alienating people with no interest in either?
Not that I’m going to watch a 30 monute video of a fan justifying hegemony. It’s hard enough to navigate around that shit at this stage.
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Don’t worry about that. It’s a rather critical description of why superhero dominance is bad.
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Well, the Thanos story arc was an opulent, visually stunning marathon tacitly endorsing genocide and white savior mythologies. Sounds like something John Ford would have loved.
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Batman doesn’t ride a horse, duh!!
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There are exceptions, like when an EMP wipes out all electronics in the region and a recently-called-out-of-retirement Batman has to embark on a violent Frank Miller vigilante fantasy to restore order in the city.
It remains unclear whether Bat-Horse has an afterburner installed in his butt.
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It could be both if they made this movie.
I guess they made a Jonah Hex movie in 2010, but did anyone see it?
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So “Superhero films arent Westerns / Superhero films are shitty IP-protected Westerns”.
ok, then “Superhero films are IP-protected Westerns”
(altho, there is a quibble. yes, the majority of westerns, esp at the end, were terrible. but when we think “western” now we’re holding in mind only those top 100 (of the 1000s) that made the grade. meanwhile, the vast majority of superhero films are shitty, and there probably havent even been 100 total so far, because theyre so expensive to make. so, to say, “well, most westerns were shitty” doesnt give the whole picture.)
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The vast, vast majority of westerns are utterly shitty worthless films.
Obviously this isn’t so much the case any more where the appalling assumptions underlying them are almost inevitably critiqued in any new western.
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“Quick, to the Bat Stable!!”
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IIRC the Green Hornet is also canonically the Lone Ranger’s grand-nephew.
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One reason westerns were so prolific in their heyday is that they’re one of the cheapest kinds of period films to shoot. If you want a Medieval fantasy movie you have to build a bunch of fake castles and elaborate costumes and train people in sword fighting. If you want a Napoleonic War movie you have to get thousands of extras in uniform and try to secure permission to shoot at European capitols, etc.
If you want to shoot a Western all you need is a few guys who know how to ride horses, an abandoned town or hastily-constructed simulacra of such and a few prop guns full of blanks. Ergo; every cheap-ass movie studio was making westerns for as long as they could get people to pay for a ticket.
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Please stop using Western film plot lines for Superhero films, it makes people compare them to each other.
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At least when they do it right. Dances with Wolves raked in almost 20x it’s production budget:
But then you sometimes get a director like Gore Verbinski who just doesn’t understand what a Western is supposed to be, and somehow manages to spend about $250 million (not including $150 million on marketing) making a Lone Ranger movie that was a critical and financial flop.
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It didn’t help that Verbinski insisted on building a working full-scale replica of an 1860s locomotive and miles of train track instead of just renting one or something.
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Little surprised Dances with Wolves was so cheap to make. Maybe that isn’t adjusted for inflation.
Or, more likely, they would use the permanent Wild West sets on studio backlots.
“Movie ranches” on the outskirts of Los Angeles were also used as locations for Westerns and other films needing open countryside.
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Well, but when are westerns going to stop using plotlines to Samurai films? 
Well, but it mostly could be filmed in on location out west, apparently on private land for most of is, which actually probably saved costs:
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I agree, originality is lost in Holly-Weird.
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