Superhero movies need to stop happening for a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, I love superhero movies. As someone who never got into comics as a child, they exposed me to a medium that I otherwise wouldn’t have been familiar with. The problem is that they are all the rage now.

“Way too many of them, but they’re good,” says sophomore Tim Buckley. Which is my thought exactly. They’re way too numerous and way too good. The genre is going to burn itself out by the end of the decade.

Let’s go back to the 80s. The slasher movie was in its heyday, but what happened by the 90s? Audiences were starting to get used to and sick of all the tropes and clichés of the genre, because there were too many of them.

“No, I don’t think there’s too many. Artists should express their vision of a certain superhero,” says senior Julian van Drunen. Which is all fine and good if filmmakers visions weren’t all the same.

Is it just me, or are all superhero movies now about putting a modern spin on the lore and grounding it more in reality? Do the films Man of Steel and FANT4STIC ring any bells? Filmmakers pick and choose different elements of the comics that span multiple years and storylines. Why are they all picking and choosing the same elements?

I predict that the superhero genre burnout is going to be even worse than it was for the slasher movie. The slasher movie was able to survive through affectionate parodies like Scream that both poked fun at genre conventions and played them straight. Parodies of superhero movies are already happening now when the genre is at its height. Kick Ass was released two years after the original Iron Man. Ant-Man was simultaneously this and a parody of heist films. Deadpool isn’t a perfect fit, but still within the same ballpark.

“Eventually [the public’s going to get sick of them]–five years, four years, whenever they run out of money,” says Buckley.

Superhero movies could always reinvent themselves by going back to the ultra cheesiness of the Adam West Batman TV series. I think 1997’s Batman & Robin proved that audiences don’t want to see that on the silver screen.

That isn’t my point. Superhero movies don’t need to go away forever. If done right, it’s been shown that the formula works. Take The Dark Knight for example. All I’m saying is that there needs to be a brief break every once in awhile to prevent the huge crash I see coming. Plus, do we need new superhero movies every couple of months? Why can’t it be a new one every couple of years and the public can re-watch their old favorites?

“My favorites are the ones that I grew up with,” says Van Drunen