Boom, the 21st century superhero film: the output of Hollywood industrialised culture

Abstract

The proliferation of superhero films is entrenched within Hollywood blockbuster cinema. Fundamental to Hollywood production is a complex nexus of cultural, economic, historical, industrial, and legal dynamics.

In this thesis, I will explore what “the genius of the [contemporary] system” entails, focusing specifically on how superhero blockbusters exemplify the attitudes, behaviours and practices of Hollywood studios. The superhero film maps a recent movement within the Hollywood system toward conglomeration and consequent domination within the cultural industries. Classical Hollywood established this cultural impetrative to monopolise and continues to structure the practices of Hollywood studios. Superhero blockbusters articulate the capabilities of Hollywood studios for authorship. The implications of the subsumption of DC Comics and Marvel within the corporate structures of Warner and Disney, and the licensing contracts with Sony and 20th Century Fox is that Hollywood studios possess considerable power in moulding superhero films to comply with their tastes, desires and risk-manage their anxieties over unpredictable box office returns.

I will further explore what I term the ‘Hollywood’s culture of production’ within contemporary Hollywood. I view this production culture through the lenses of social theory, history, legal structures, and mythologies. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Foucault and Althusser will reveal how ideologies shape Hollywood studio practices. An account of the industrial histories of Hollywood and comic books will reveal the particular social, temporal and legal circumstances of the convergence between these two texts and industries. An analysis of the mythologies of the American monomyth and Christianity will illuminate that the culture of production in Hollywood is ingratiated within American commodified culture. Thus, superhero films, often dismissed as escapist mass entertainment, are actually highly socially meaningful commodities that elucidate the complex industrial relationships, the history, and contemporary culture of production in Hollywood.