When the coronavirus pandemic hit early in the spring, I found myself surprised by how much I was anticipating the June release of the new comic book movie Wonder Woman 1984. Perhaps if Diana Prince (aka Wonder Woman) and her shield were again seen on movie screens, the world would be set right. The timing of the movie seemed to promise a quick end to the coronavirus and its attendant lockdowns. If Wonder Woman was back, so, too, would be other emblems of the summer, such as rock concerts and Fourth of July parades.
Well, the release of Wonder Woman 1984 was moved from June to August. Then it was moved again, this time to October. That plan remained in place until mid-September, when the studio got cold feet and switched the release to Christmas Day.
When Wonder Woman 1984 opens on Dec. 25, I suppose I will go to see it, but I fear that my appetite for watching its heroine romp through a 1980s-era shopping mall will have long since subsided. Who wants to see a comic book movie as we’re all carving turkeys, guzzling eggnog, and, presumably, singing carols on Zoom? You see, the comic book movie will forever be associated in my mind with the lazy days of summer.
A bit of personal history: I grew up with the original Christopher Reeve Superman films, but I did not have the pleasure of experiencing them in real time. I was 4 1/2 years old when the final film in the series, Superman IV, was released in the summer of 1987. So, I watched every Superman film on rented (and later, following bouts of pleading to my parents, purchased) VHS tapes. When I was a little older, I held out hope for the emergence of an imagined Superman V, but it was not to be.
As a film franchise, Superman may have entered a comatose state for the next two decades or so, but in 1989, the Man of Steel’s cowl-wearing colleague from Gotham was awarded a film series of his own. The Tim Burton and Michael Keaton version of Batman came out on June 23, smack dab in the middle of my summer vacation, thus inaugurating a lasting tradition in my moviegoing life. During most summers thereafter, I could reliably be found in my local multiplex checking out the latest comic book movie.
Now, the first Superman was a Christmastime release in 1978, but ever since, the studios have preferred the summer releases for comic book movies. Summer, after all, belongs to children. It’s the one season they don’t have school, so why shouldn’t they have the theaters to themselves?
Yet the connection goes deeper than that. In the summer, children are given a three-month-long respite from math tests, mean teachers, and competitive peers. They are invited to expand their imaginations, to go camping, to play baseball, and to tell scary stories in backyard tents. Comic book movies satisfy a similar sort of wide-eyed wish: to see a favorite hero (or heroine) spring to life. The original Superman films functioned as wish fulfillment of the most fundamental sort. What 4- or 5-year-old would not thrill at the sight of a superhero soaring from spot to spot? I would not have made this comparison at the time, but the films echo the life-affirming zest of the Douglas Fairbanks epics of the 1920s, especially Raoul Walsh’s Thief of Bagdad.
The early entrants in the comic book movie genre prized faithfulness to their source material. Christopher Reeve’s Superman outfit was strictly a Silver Age affair, while the film version of Dick Tracy, which I saw in the summer of 1990, was so accurate in replicating the style of cartoonist Chester Gould that reading the comics afterward was almost a letdown. Who needed the drawings when Warren Beatty and company so plausibly brought those characters to life? Sometimes, superficial fidelity was all these films had going for them: The 1990 screen version of Captain America, starring Matt (son of J.D.) Salinger, nailed the costuming, but not much else.
Summer is built around expectation, too, another reason why comic book movies, which are often anticipated for months or years in advance, are tailor-made for the season. Most of us remember marking our calendars each summer, and mine was filled with “Xs” noting the days until the release of Batman Returns in June of 1992. Waiting for the movie was part of the fun, and in those pre-internet days, it was possible to avoid spoilers.
The original Batman films kept my summers full in the 1990s, and, after the turn of the millennium, the first wave of Spider-Man films picked up the slack. By then, I had long since started to fill my summer moviegoing schedule with other fare, but the guileless innocence of these movies remained appealing. Comic book movies of this era tended to be warmer and more inviting than the steely action blockbusters that once dominated summer screens (say, Speed or Die Hard with a Vengeance), and they also were grounded in a kind of rudimentary moral intelligence, pitting good guys against bad.
“I am here to fight for truth and justice and the American way,” Superman told Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) in the original Superman. Although this post-Watergate incarnation of Lois scoffed at such a fuddy-duddy notion, I still remember being struck as a child by the profound seriousness of Superman’s retort: “I’m sure you don’t really mean that, Lois.” As personified by Reeve, Superman (and his alter ego, Clark Kent) embodied a sort of unimpeachable, straight-faced rectitude, a child’s dream of what a grown-up should be.
Eventually, the movie landscape became inundated with movies drawn from the universes of Marvel or DC. You might think that I was in hog heaven, but I found it to be too much of a good thing. Plus, these films began to stray from the traditional summer release window — Doctor Strange came out in November 2016, Birds of Prey in February of this year. These films would have been more fun if they had not been sharing theater space with Oscar bait.
This year, I shall mourn as another casualty of the coronavirus the absence of comic book movies in their natural habitat of the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Please, Warner Bros., why not just call it a day and move Wonder Woman 1984 to next summer?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
