{"id":43625,"date":"2025-07-28T22:11:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T22:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/43625\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T22:11:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T22:11:18","slug":"superhero-movies-have-stopped-obsessing-over-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/43625\/","title":{"rendered":"Superhero Movies Have Stopped Obsessing Over Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a repeating theme across 2025\u2019s major superhero movies\u2014Captain America: Brave New World<\/a>, Thunderbolts<\/a>, Superman<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0Fantastic Four: First Steps<\/a>.\u00a0All four have interesting, sometimes conflicting relationships with time and how far along their characters are into their superhero tenures, making these movies simultaneous continuations and introductions.<\/p>\n

Time has always been a key part of superhero movies, and it used to be that their starting points could be whenever a creative team chose. In 1978, Superman could be an origin story, while 1989\u2019s Batman\u00a0could take place at a nebulous (but still early) time in his career, and that was that. Both the latter and 1998\u2019s\u00a0Blade happen after the characters have realized their identities, but they also touch on their respective origins\u2014an efficient way to help newcomers dive in. This approach persisted in the early 2000s with Daredevil, X-Men (to a point), and\u00a0Constantine,\u00a0while other heroes like\u00a0Spider-Man and the Hulk came to the silver screen to have their beginnings told.<\/p>\n

\"Fantastic\u00a9 Marvel Studios <\/p>\n

After Batman Begins<\/a> became a hit in 2005, \u201corigin\u201d was the word of the day, and it wasn\u2019t long before we were seeing how James Bond, the crew of the Enterprise<\/a>, and plenty more came to become as we know them. It actually took superheroes a little longer to get on board, but time had to matter once cinematic universes began taking off: Green Lantern, Iron Man, Captain America, the list of origins is well-documented. During the 2010s, some of the most interesting experimentation with this formula came from team movies; Black Panther technically never gets an origin in either Captain America: Civil War\u00a0or his 2018 solo movie, and\u00a0Ant-Man\u00a0is both an origin and pseudo-legacy sequel (in spirit more than anything). Meanwhile, the 2016 Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy had characters who came in pre-formed but gave us plots about the beginnings of one or more characters; Harley Quinn & the Birds of Prey<\/a>\u00a0can\u2019t really exist without the building blocks established by\u00a0Squad,\u00a0and the first and third\u00a0Guardians\u00a0are directly about how Peter Quill and Rocket became as we first see them.<\/p>\n

For the first-timers making their big-screen debuts, these origin stories were a necessary onboarding process and typically worked well enough to get audiences invested. Repeat heroes weren\u2019t so lucky\u2014since it hadn\u2019t really been that long since we last saw them, their retold origins were looked at with disdain, usually because their changes went against tradition and could be overcomplicated or just bad. Between the Amazing Spider-Man\u00a0duology<\/a> and the 2015\u00a0Fantastic Four\u00a0reboot, Marvel was certainly the worst offender of the 2010s, and it\u2019s no wonder that it elected to just hit the ground running with Tom Holland\u2019s MCU-approved Peter Parker. The lack of an onscreen origin was appreciated but ended up working against this specific iteration now that he could hang with the Avengers. With nary a mention of Uncle Ben, fans felt like something was missing with this particular Peter, in turn leading to his Home trilogy stealthily becoming an origin story<\/a> so he could be a more \u201cfaithful\u201d Spider-Man beginning with 2026\u2019s Brand New Day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The origin approach has changed in the 2020s, in part because TV shows have become more integrated into these cinematic universes and can now handle that part of a character\u2019s life. Marvel\u2019s used several of its shows to give characters their origins or put them in specific places so they can come to the big screen like they\u2019re having just another day on the job, as we\u2019ve seen in Brave New World, The Marvels,\u00a0and\u00a0Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness<\/a>. Fantastic Four,\u00a0which takes place in an alternate universe<\/a>, also goes for this approach, opening with the heroes having already gone through the struggles of their superpowers offscreen and now operating as a superhero team and worldwide celebrities for about five years. The movie uses old footage and a TV show host to get audiences up to speed, a more tactile and period-appropriate way compared to just having characters explain themselves to others in the first act of the film, as is the case in Marvels\u00a0or\u00a0Thunderbolts.<\/p>\n

\"The\u00a9 Warner Bros. <\/p>\n

Conversely, DC\u2019s going back to the old ways and just having movies take place early enough in their heroes\u2019 timelines. As The Batman\u00a0and\u00a0Superman\u00a0open, the respective heroes have been around for two or three years and have some experience, but still have some things to learn so they can become the version fans expect them to be. There\u2019s no real origin playing out in any of these movies; supporting characters like Catwoman and the Penguin in Batman\u00a0and\u00a0Superman\u2019s\u00a0Justice Gang<\/a> have also been doing their own thing for some time. Again, some of these characters have already been on screen before in general audiences\u2019 lifetimes, so the heavy lifting\u2019s been partially done, but this is also done to show them that an actual world\u2019s going on outside the frame<\/a> and they\u2019re getting a chance to see what things are like in Gotham or Metropolis for a few days.<\/p>\n

What do origin stories look like going forward for DC and Marvel? It\u2019s been years since either did ones for characters who weren\u2019t first introduced beforehand\u2014Shang-Chi<\/a>\u00a0in 2021 and Blue Beetle<\/a>\u00a0in 2023\u2014and it could take quite a while for a pre-established character to get a spotlight for their backstory to play out. (Don\u2019t forget, it took Black Widow 11 years worth of guest appearances and her onscreen death for us to learn her full deal.) Fully ignoring the origin isn\u2019t entirely an option, as Superman\u00a0and\u00a0Fantastic Four\u00a0critiques have shown just jumping in fully can also put off some audiences, whether they\u2019re a diehard fan or it\u2019s their first time seeing these characters. That the two films try to shake things up is appreciated nonetheless, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see how later projects figure out how to make the beginning feel new again\u2026 so long as we don\u2019t have to watch Uncle Ben or the Waynes get shot again.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a repeating theme across 2025\u2019s major superhero movies\u2014Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Superman,\u00a0and\u00a0Fantastic Four: First Steps.\u00a0All…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-43625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}