Some ants may have died in the production of this movie

by Thom Yee

Ant-Man images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

One of the things that’s really helped to make a regularly updated movie review website a sustainable endeavour over the last three years here at GOO Reviews has been the rapid proliferation of superhero movies. They’ve consistently been some of the leading tentpole movies of their respective seasons and years of release, they’re easy to schedule reviews around, and, frankly, they’re easy to write about. As a lifelong comicbook nerd and as someone who usually finds more to believe in from these fictional heroes than from anyone in our non-fictional world, I always get a kick out of watching them, and it’s usually easy for me to find something new to say about them.

On the other hand, Ant-Man is coming out at what may be a crossroads for the superhero movie in general. After almost ten years of consistent critical and box office success, there’s been an undeniable and growing shift in recent viewer preferences away from the format as it stands today. It started with low rumblings as people started to gripe about how sick they were of origin movies, it’s continued through a vocal recognition of how formulaic and unremarkable superhero movies are becoming, and right now I think it’s a movement spearheaded by some of the outright animosity Avengers: Age of Ultron has received from critics, the general movie-going public, and even some underwhelmed former fans. Continue reading →