In a year without Marvel movies, The Old Guard redefined the superhero blockbuster
Image: Photo: Aimee Spinks/Netflix Film Features Age of heroes
It finally happened. For nearly a decade, since The Avengers came out and crushed all expectations, people have been wondering when Marvel’s utter dominance of the box office would end. That dominance did end in 2020, but then, so did the box office. The superhero-movie apocalypse that has appalled so many filmmakers is over, at least for now. What we’ve got instead is an actual apocalypse. Someone should’ve told Martin Scorsese to stay away from that monkey’s paw.
Only one big-budget superhero movie made it to theaters in 2020: Cathy Yan’s Birds Of Prey, which opened in February, about a month before everything went to shit. When Birds Of Prey earned $33 million in its first weekend, it was considered a catastrophic underperformance. But when the pandemic hit, expectations changed. At this point, any studio head would sell his soul for a film that brought in $84 million at the domestic box office. Birds Of Prey will go down in history as the No. 3 highest-earning film of 2020. Congratulations to Birds Of Prey.
This whole year is one big asterisk. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe had ended its unbroken winning streak with the climax of Avengers: Endgame and the fun denouement of Spider-Man: Far From Home, there might’ve been something poetic about that. Marvel isn’t finished, of course. Black Widow and Eternals, the studio’s planned 2020 releases, will eventually reach the public in some form or other. (They both have theatrical release dates set for next year, though release dates are now ephemeral things.) WandaVision, the first of the MCU’s Disney+ TV series, will also start airing in January. But it’s hard to know whether Marvel will ever be able to recapture its hold over moviegoers’ imaginations. It’s hard to know if anything ever will.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s distinguished competitors at DC reportedly will release its big 2020 swing, Wonder Woman 1984, in some theaters on Christmas, but it is also scheduled to go to HBO Max the same day. As a marketing initiative, Wonder Woman 1984 is almost certainly the most consequential superhero film of the year. It’s a would-be blockbuster that now serves a strategic function for a big streaming service. Right now, the competition among streaming services is the only thing Hollywood really has going on. And maybe Wonder Woman 1984 will be important as a movie as well. We’ll see.
In the meantime, the biggest and best superhero film of 2020 might not even be a superhero movie. It’s a story of unkillable soldiers—immortal figures who exist in shadows and despair at their inability to make the world a better place. In many ways, the protagonists of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Old Guard are the opposite of the cinematic superheroes that we’ve come to know. Where Marvel and DC heroes are larger-than-life public figures with their own instantly recognizable emblems, the members of the Old Guard are desperate to avoid anyone noticing their presence. Where superheroes glibly banter their way through apocalyptic scenarios, the Old Guard only tell gallows-humor jokes. Even the darkest traditional superheroes seem to embody some sense of societal optimism. The Old Guard’s ancient warriors, on the other hand, have to be convinced that humanity shouldn’t be left to obliterate itself.
The Old Guard, which went straight to Netflix over the summer, doesn’t look like a superhero movie. It’s drab and grey and visceral. Rather than the vast-scale bloodless battles we’ve gotten used to seeing, it has nasty, brutal, bloody close-quarters combat. In the rare occasions when traditional superheroes die, they die in bombastic, operatic fashion. The characters of The Old Guard die again and again, and then they’re cruelly brought back to life, grunting softly as their bodies painfully reject the bullets that have just riddled them. You get the sense that their physical pain is real, even if it never sidelines them. “Just because we keep living doesn’t mean we stop hurting,” one of the immortals explains, and the film makes sure that you feel that.
But The Old Guard is a superhero story; it’s just one of the many superhero stories that attempts to subvert superhero stories. It is, after all, a movie about a superpowered team that’s out to take down bad guys. Greg Rucka, a writer who’s done great work for both Marvel and DC, published his first Old Guard comic in 2017; Skydance Media optioned the film rights before the second issue came out. Rucka wrote the movie, and he made certain storyline points—like the romance between immortal warriors Joe and Nick—conditions of the deal.
Old Guard director Gina Prince-Blythewood had never made any sort of action movie before. Her past films, like Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights, are finely observed dramas, and she’s great at communicating character details and conversational subtleties. Prince-Blythewood is also the first Black woman ever to direct a superhero movie. She tells much of her story in glances and silences. We get the sense that these immortal characters are old friends with old rituals and stories that we’ll never hear. When a new immortal enters the scene—the tough Marine Nile Freeman, played by If Beale Street Could Talk’s KiKi Layne—she becomes the viewer surrogate. The ancient warriors seem put out by her presence, and by the fact that they have to explain the rules all over again. It keeps all the necessary exposition from weighing the narrative down.
The Old Guard also has the advantage of a supremely qualified cast. Charlize Theron is an Oscar-winning movie star who doesn’t have to be out here roundhouse-kicking motherfuckers in the face. But in the past half-decade, Theron has made Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, carving out a place for herself on the list of all-time action-movie greats. Theron radiates heartbroken resentment of human cruelty all throughout The Old Guard; her weary disgust with violence is palpable. But she also looks utterly convincing when doing monkey-flipping a guy in the middle of a gunfight, say, or shooting another twice in the face and then pistol-whipping him. It doesn’t make a ton of sense for someone to use a battle-axe as a weapon in 2020, but she makes it convincing. “That woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn,” someone says. I don’t know if anyone else could’ve justified that line the way Theron does.
In 2019, Theron starred in the delightful romantic comedy Long Shot, which opened a week after Avengers: Endgame and was utterly obliterated at the box office as a result. It’s not Theron’s fault that someone at some studio tried to turn her movie into a ill-fated counter-programming attempt, but there’s still something satisfying in seeing Theron headlining the biggest superhero movie in the year that no Marvel joints could come out.
The rest of the cast is almost comically overqualified as well. The great Chewitel Ejiofor, for instance, mostly just does concerned squinting. Marwan Kenzari gives a beautiful, poetic speech about eternal love that comes off as something much more than the comedy beat it could’ve been. KiKi Layne brings real vulnerability to her hardness. Even Harry Melling, the former Dudley Dursely and current Netflix-casting favorite, is excellently loathsome as the pharma-bro villain, a guy who believes in the divine right of CEOs. Some of these actors simply don’t get enough to do. If the teased sequel comes to pass, we’ll hopefully get to see more of Veronica Ngo, star of the excellently grimy Vietnamese action flick Furie. I’m a little mad that Ngo and Charlize Theron were in the same movie and didn’t get to fight each other, even if that wouldn’t have made any narrative sense. Maybe next time.
But even that obligatory pre-credits stinger feels fresh and exciting. Prince-Blythewood walks us through the expected superhero-movie beats—the origin saga, the team bonding, the betrayal, the villainous monologue, the final showdown—and mostly makes them sing. The origin story, in particular, is a lot of fun. Layne’s Nile Freeman has trouble, as one might, in believing that she’s really an unkillable elite warrior. So Theron’s Andy just rolls her eyes and kills this newbie over and over, until she figures it out. Andy is the hero, but she’s also kind of an asshole, and the movie never really softens that.
Though The Old Guard tackles superhero-movie cliches in interesting ways, it has more difficulty with the emerging conventions of the Netflix movie. There are moments where it feels like an algorithmic product. Netflix has evidently determined that people want to see violent movies about teams of globe-trotting avengers; The Old Guard is a whole lot better than, say, Michael Bay’s 6 Underground, but it also sticks to many of the same routines. The Old Guard is also a movie without a ton of style. Things like the turgid score make it less lively than it could’ve been.
But The Old Guard still felt like a balm when it came out. The film hit Netflix the same July weekend that the excellent Andy Samberg movie Palm Springs came to Hulu. The two films were nothing alike in tone or storytelling, but both had things to say about the endless-repeat mundanity of immortality. They were beamed into our houses at a moment when many of us probably felt plenty mortal but when we were also getting used to a new kind of crushing monotony. They arrived right on time.
God only knows how the cinematic landscape will look after this pandemic, but The Old Guard quietly, casually alters the scope of what a superhero movie can be. The characters can be graceful and dignified, and they can resist the urge to fire off constant one-liners. The action scenes can be both floridly virtuosic and bone-crunchingly gross. The movie depicts one queer love story and hints at another, and it never treats either as a big deal. Maybe the bigger superhero-movie assembly lines will take note. Or maybe those assembly lines just won’t run like they once did.
Because of the way Netflix operates, we don’t even know whether The Old Guard is a hit in any measurable sense. Netflix itself claims that 78 million households have watched it, and I have no idea whether that’s a good number. According to Variety, a survey has The Old Guard as the No. 7 most-watched straight-to-streaming movie of the year—Netflix’s second-biggest offering behind Extraction. But we won’t really know what kind of impact The Old Guard has had until we start seeing whether the film influences anyone. I hope it does.
Other notable 2020 superhero movies: There aren’t many: Birds Of Prey is the only one that got a real, non-pandemic-affected theatrical release, and it’s a nasty little delight full of gory visual humor and slapstick charm. Margot Robbie’s central performance is a true star turn, a wildly charismatic take on the sort of edgelord jokes that could be tiresome from almost anyone else. Pretty good action scenes, too! Birds Of Prey doesn’t turn the genre on its ear or anything, but its theatrical silliness is a fun time.
The Vin Diesel joint Bloodshot, weirdly, is another adaptation of a lesser-known comic book about a guy who keeps coming back to life about dying. It hit theaters two days after America started shutting down, and it wasn’t really lively enough to make fun quarantine viewing when it hit VOD. Similarly, the Netflix joint Project Power just feels like a trashy straight-to-streaming B-movie with plot points about superpowers unconvincingly grafted on. And then there’s The New Mutants, the sad end of Fox’s X-Men franchise, which finally limped into theaters after years on the shelf. In the best-case scenario, a superhero film is supposed to be an event—a reason to get fired up and join a cheering crowd on opening night. Most of this year’s slate just seemed to underline how depressing that absence is.
117 Comments
Could we get an interview with the Warner Brothers executive who moved Wonder Woman’s release date from Winter 2019 to spring 2020? Was it to influence the presidential election? Was it a box office move? Was it a coke fueled fever dream? He literally set a quarter of a billion dollars on fire…. so I am just curious.
Maybe it cost more more to keep holding it… maybe HBOMax wanted a hit (and understand streaming is the place to invest right now cause its booming) or maybe they figured they’d write it off like every other studio is doing. Prob easier to take a hit when every single one of your competitors is in the same boat (even Disney)
You are misunderstanding the question. It wasn’t about the executive who decided to finally release it to streaming, it’s about the executive who decided to delay it in 2019 before there was even a pandemic. Hindsight being what it is, but that move cost them a lot of money now.
I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure the issue was that the movie wasn’t anywhere close to done and that it wasn’t really an executive decision.
I was under the impression that it *was* pretty much ready for fall 2019, or on track to be. It shot in the second half of 2018, and did some additional photography in mid-2019 (and by then, the release date had changed, so presumably they could have fit those extra days in earlier if needed). I remember reading interviews with Patty Jenkins around the first spring/summer 2020 delays that basically said the movie had been done for a while so it was frustrating not being able to get it out there.
DC stuff, weirdly, often feels like it’s done way ahead of time, even by blockbuster standards. Batman v. Superman was completely done with shooting, even the additional stuff, by the end of 2014. I remember being surprised that when it moved off its May 2016 release date, it only went up a month or so, when it seemed like it could have gone even earlier (though Force Awakens loomed for holiday 2015, so that probably helped keep it in 2016).
I think the decision to move WW84 was more about getting it out of a crowded late 2019 (that included guaranteed $400 million+ domestic hits Frozen 2 and Rise of Skywalker, as well as Warner’s Joker movie in October) and into the original’s proven summer slot. It was going to come out almost exactly three years after the original, which seems like an optimal sequel lag. Two years sometimes feels too soon; four or five years often feels too late. But, yes, in this case they would have made way more money squeezing it into November 2019. Who knew?
I think about this line reading all the time!!
yeah it feels like they greenlit, shot and released joker after ww1984 was basically already done.
DC stuff, weirdly, often feels like it’s done way ahead of time, even by blockbuster standards. Batman v. Superman was completely done with shooting, even the additional stuff, by the end of 2014.I wonder if this has anything to do with their lower than expected returns. By not utilizing the time they had to get it right, they lost the opportunity to put out truly special movies.
I enjoyed the first Wonder Women, but not like I’ve enjoyed the many Marvel films I’ve seen. It was still missing something (that last act didn’t help) that I can’t quite put my finger on.
I’d put Wonder Woman easily on part with the better MCU movies. Not the very top (which I’d say belongs to Black Panther), but certainly better than at least 50% of what they’ve done. For that matter, I’d say the same about Aquaman and Birds of Prey; neither as good as WW, but also a lot better than the MCU mean. (And financially speaking, Wonder Woman and Aquaman were both on the upper end of the pre-Black Panther MCU expectations.)But I don’t think it’s a question of DC movies taking less time, anyway. I don’t think they have a rushed schedule; they seem like they have pretty normal shooting schedules and the requisite time at the end/later to do some reshoots/pick-ups/tweaks/etc. BVS was done shooting by the end of 2014 because it started shooting in early 2014, not because they did it in three weeks or something. Justice League feels like the time-crunch exception; for whatever reason, it didn’t shoot until BVS was already out—which for a normal sequel would actually be very fast, but for a long-planned follow-up to a movie that had been done for a year, with the follow-up dated for release 18 months later, it was a tight turnaround. (I guess Snyder was still in post on BVS for a while and Gadot was busy shooting WW, but still; feels like they really blew their lead.) Reflected in all the panicked pivoting. JL excepted, I do think all of the DC movies so far have pretty much reflected what the filmmakers intended (even if there were compromises along the way). It’s just that in Snyder’s case, the filmmakers were intending something that’s kind of dumb and half-coherent. That’s always been the case (and I even find his movies interesting, which is how I know from watching Sucker Punch that this is how his movies are).
I consider AQUAMAN the DCEU’s best film so far. The world is so rich and gorgeous.
It was probably “we need more time to redo the part of the movie that test audiences hated,” which isn’t a remotely unusual move. Not being a precog, he clearly didn’t know there would be a movie-industry-breaking pandemic coming. No sane person would blame anyone for that move… not that Hollywood is sane.
It was 100% a box office move; they didn’t wanna open against Star Wars.
It’s all moot now anyway, since the film industry will eventually settle into something different than before, but it does seem like at the end of 2019, that sort of conventional wisdom about movies should have been more or less finishing up. With the Moviepass model fully in swing, it just seems like there’s no reason two blockbusters couldn’t sit nearly side by side. Probably better not to pitch it directly against Star Wars, even though in the case of RoS, doing so might have been almost as inspired as predicting a pandemic would wipe out the movie industry the following year. But settled between Frozen 2 and Star Wars, it would still have probably made just as much money as a summer release. Before I got A-list, I would try to limit movies to twice a month, and only the ones I really wanted to see. But once I had it, I’d see whatever was playing if I had an evening free.
I, like many other people, don’t have Moviepass or A-List (I’ve never even heard of that one), & work too much to see multiple theatrical films a month.
A-List was AMC’s equivalent to Moviepass, valid only at their theaters. Regal has their own, and I think a few other chains had them as well. A-List was the biggest, with probably over a million subscribers by the end of 2019. A million isn’t a whole lot, considering blockbuster movies are making billions of dollars these days, but I think it’s a substantial chunk of the regular movie going public. Obviously both Disney and WB want you to pick their movie as the only one you watch in December, but I think there are far fewer people like you rationing time to see only one movie a month than there used to be. Or, anyway, that would have been the case.
I’m not arguing with you, by the way. I think it’s obvious they moved it away from SW. I just think that all other things equal, even people like you who might not have seen it in December might have caught it in January or February, and many other people would have just seen one more movie in December.
Yeah, I think if less emphasis was put on opening weekends & more on extending the life of a film, they could’ve left it where it was.
well, it is kind of like when 20th Century Fox gave George Lucas merchandise rights for a little film called Star Wars, because what good would that do in 1975 when about the only merchandizing that was done before then was maybe a Planet of the Apes lunch box? It made Lucas six billion dollars and 20th Century Fox made jack.No one can predict the future
The same idiot who is only putting WB movies on streaming in the US, thinking that international numbers will float it for a hail mary play to save HBOMax in the states. Rest of the world can get covid.
Did anyone else wonder if there was some resentment from Booker towards Nicky and Josef? Because of who they are, these two have found truly eternal love (or as long as their powers last) and can keep that happiness going, but Booker has just had to keep losing people who come to hate him because he’ll live while they die. I don’t know if I was picking up on something that wasn’t there, but I did feel like there was some tension between the three.
Oh yeah there was straight up tension/resentment/envy. He even tells Nicky and Joe (when they’re caught) that they didn’t understand the pain and loneliness because they had each other over the centuries.The reason Andy and Booker became so disillusioned with life was because they were straight up alone… whereas Joe and Nicky were going great on their 1000+ year
Wasn’t this, like, just a movie about a bunch of Highlanders?
Only it took itself way too seriously.
“There can be only some!” ~ Highlanders
More like a movie about a bunch of Wolverines
Wolverine/Logan is not immortal though. His mutant power just make him growing old really, really, really slow.
Unlike the bunch in The Old Guards who can still stand for thousands of years. You can expecting Logan to kick the bucket somewhere around this century.
Hey, there are some Angelines in amongst that mob of Wolverines.
I started off cold with this movie, but significantly warmed up to it by the end. It’s the perfect b-movie – smart enough to not get in the way of the stupidity. Sure, the final thesis that violence is necessary to promote peace is the same kind of pretzel logic in service of making a questionable, but rad narrative moral as Assassin’s Creed making assassins good guys, but it was mostly good times.My favorite is how they dealt with Booker’s betrayal. They weren’t mad, just disappointed. It stands to reason a group together for so long, seeing and enduring such catastrophic events, would have a measured reaction to something that would destroy any mortal relationship or sense of trust. All in all, good, reasonably clever fun.
The premise of ‘with all of the people you’ve killed over the years, you’ve also saved people who went on to do good’ is a little bit silly when you compare that with the number of people that could be saved with that whole ‘limited immortality’ deal. If the pharma-bro had been a reasonable dude, rather than the most dickish dick to ever dick someone over their position would have been way less sympathetic.
Like if someone had just come to them and said “Hey, so I understand that you five are all basically Wolverine. I know that you’ve been burned as witches in the past and shit, so maybe you’re wary, but what I’m looking to do is find out what gives you your abilities and reproduce it for the mass market. That’s going to save a lot of lives, you’re all into that, right?”And they’re like “So who do we shoot for this?”And the science-man CEO dude is all “No, no shooting anyone. Just curing cancer, regrowing body parts, ending diseases, shit like that.”And they’re just “Hah…gaaaayyyyy. Nah man, that’s not what we’re about. Later bro, we’re off to chop some people in the face.”
Yeah, the protagonists truly did find the least efficient method to use their immortality to help people.
It’s eminently believable, however, that somebody with a superpower is firmly in the “fuck you, got mine” camp, no matter how much they luxuriate in their emo sessions. Better yet, they can tell themselves the same comforting story that nuclear powers do about proliferation: obviously I ain’t giving up mine, but it’s still better for the world if nobody new gets any, because it’s just too much power for anyone. But again: not giving up mine. Fuck you.
Yeeeah, who the fuck goes “hey we need to hide that we can’t die, let’s pick the most violent profession possible”. I could *not* get behind the premise. Become a teacher FFS.
It’s Prince-Bythewood. No “l” in there.Just think of Prince standing next to a forest.I liked parts of the movie, but hated the plot and the villain. Also, I’d rather they hadn’t bothered setting up a sequel that’s probably never going to happen (in their ~five years making films, Netflix hasn’t made a sequel to any of their non-romcom movies, despite always proclaiming how successful they are).Bringing forward the plot they set up for the sequel in this movie would have been more interesting.
Just think of Prince standing next to a forest.That’s how he knew what it sounded like when doves cry.
Counter-point: I found this movie stupid and tiresome despite a couple of excellent scenes (I fully understand why Rucker insisted on keeping that one particular scene as a hard contractual matter so it couldn’t be edited out). I *wanted* it to be a lot better, but it really was nothing more than a transparent attempt to kickstart an action franchise, which I would be fully behind if the story had been half good.On the plus side, the future is wide open. It’s possible they will make some excellent sequels given the open nature of the story framing. But please, please, please, hire some screenwriters who have a feel for plot, theme and structure for the next instalment. It doesn’t have to be subtle or complex — see the first John Wick for an extremely simple story that works perfectly.
“The Old Guard is also a movie without a ton of style” is putting it mildly. I wanted to like this, everyone involved is very talented, but it’s a dour, dull movie. And it has some ugly implications at the end — are we supposed to assume that everyone saved because of the team’s actions (as shown through Ejiofor’s Pepe Sylvia bulletin boards) later went on to do good things? What if they didn’t? Were they not worth saving? Is the Old Guard’s real superpower a utilitarian moral compass that lets them rescue doctors instead of deadbeat dads?
I still believe they could have done a lot more good by forming a giant multigenerational megacorp than being low level mercs. Hell, even compound interest periodically to their ‘descendants’ would have been better. Make lots of money, spend it to do good and remain out of the public eye which a lot of non-immortal (as far as we know) rich families already do. Hire *other* people to do the low level merc stuff.So many people with immortality showing *such* a lack of creativity and imagination.
Yep. It’s the Batman Paradox — if these people really were beneficent immortals, there are so many better ways they could improve the world than sporadically squadding up and fighting for apparently random selections of unfortunates.
Such a slog of a movie. At least normally in these films you can have fun watching vampires or whatever try to feel something through hedonism. This was just listening to whiny babies exercising squatters rights in bombed out tool sheds.
In a year without Marvel movies, The Old Guard redefined the superhero blockbusterI dunno about that, I mean… both Marvel and DC are also fully capable of producing well-intentioned mediocrity too. Seems the only thing that was “redefined” here was doing so via Netflix.
Netflix is a strange beast at times, their TV shows and limited series are relatively cinematic yet their movies are increasingly medicore and visually dull.
I really really liked this movie, though I feel like there were times where they focused on the less interesting parts of the story for some reason. Like, the story of an Italian Christian priest from Genoa and a Muslim warrior from Jerusalem who kill each other over and over in the names of their respective Gods during the First Crusade, only to eventually fall in love and spend 1000 years of human history with each is so interesting and beautiful, but we get all of five minutes of it in the film. Yusuf and Nicolo are the only two immortals besides baby Nile who don’t get flashback sequences about their pasts. I would have loved to see how these filmmakers would have depicted the First Crusade against the backdrop of Jerusalem during the Fatimid Caliphate. I alsothink we got too much of a focus on Quynh in the flashbacks to set up a prequel. They should have showcased the 4000+ years Andi spent alone, watching over 50 lifetimes of people live and die again and again and again around her, to make us really understand why she is the way that she is in the present. They could have done a lot of the Quynh flashbacks in a sequel more focused on her instead of putting it into this movie.
The whole movie is an unfocused mess.You’re point is perfect though – there are so many better stories in there somewhere that simply weren’t given the time to breathe.
I get what you’re saying, but I bet a lot of that comes down to budget – I read an interview where they were talking about having to tweak some elements to make them less expensive to film (eg, rather than Quynh – is that how you spell her name? – being lost at sea in a storm, she’s just dumped overboard, because a storm would have blown the budget). I think crusades might be expensive (to film, but also probably IRL also).
Honest Movie Trailers also pointed out that all the action scenes taking place in small, confined spaces like rooms and hallways was another cost-saving measure.
Though to be fair, you can’t blame Netflix for wanting to save money on a movie based on a (relatively) little-known comic book.
It blows my mind that we still haven’t gotten word from Netflix that a sequel has been officially greenlit. I keep telling myself it’s because they’re planning multiple spin-offs, including a prequel miniseries focusing slowly on the decades-long slowburn of Yusuf and Nicolo’s enemies-to-friends-to-lovers saga during the crusades. The epic sets, the romance, the drama… WHO WOULDN’T WANT TO WATCH THAT???
I watched The Old Guard the other night for the first time – and it just felt like Highlander taking itself too seriously.We enjoyed it, it was fine, the performances were far, far better than the material.But it was honestly nothing revelatory.
Will this article be updated around the end of the month with Tom’s take on WW84?
Yeah, I thought this was odd with that still to come.
i believe he is saying that the old guard is the defining superhero movie of the year, regardless.
If WW84 is only coming out at Christmas, it seems likely to be more of a 2021 movie. And thematically, the big defining feature of the year is the hiatus of cinema blockbusters.
It’ll be like Into the Spider-Verse – the 2018 column was released about this same time and went to Black Panther so Spider-Verse got a me toon in the also-rans of 2019. I don’t know if Spider-Verse would have replaced Black Panther – I’d imagine not, just from a cultural impact point of view – but Tom seemed to love it. I can’t complain though – I love that these long-running columns of his get yearly additions to keep them up to date.
While for the most part I liked Birds of Prey, my biggest issue with the movie is that they have a character named Cassandra Cain who is barely anything like her comic counterpart. In the comics she was raised to be an assassin by her abusive father and had a learning disability. In fact, her the DCEU Cass has more in common with Stephanie Brown than Cass.
That’s not a reason.
Looks like someone forgot about New Mutants (like the rest of us). It might not be MCU but it is a Marvel movie an about as a big budget movie as Deadpool was.
That’s mentioned at the end.
Did not see that (I wonder if it was edited in or just screwed up on my phone due to the video). Whoops
Looks like someone didn’t read the whole article
All i can say about the plot of New Mutants is that LEGION did it so much better.
What makes this one “bigger” or more important than Birds of Prey?
The release strategy and how it matches the cultural moment, as stated.
With Age Of Heroes, Tom Breihan picks the most important superhero movie of every year. My emphasis – it’s pretty clear why he thinks this movie is more representative of 2020 than Birds Of Prey.
The latter was too fun for 2020? :)Admittedly, I haven’t seen any superhero films from this year.I suppose it’s hard to tell which films are most important during the year of their release. Who would have thought that Blade would result in so many more Marvel movies?
I understand there might be deadlines (or maybe you had this article in the can for awhile now when it looked like no other superhero movie was going to be released), but I have to wonder if you shouldn’t have delayed this article to consider WW1984 in a few weeks. I’m skeptical that Old Guard is going to be more “important” that WW1984 down the line.Which I guess is just a potential issue with these series of columns when they have finished catching up and go yearly- it’s hard to judge what is the best or most important films of a year in action or superhero genres until some time has passed to assess it.
Do people (other than the article author) really consider this a superhero movie? I’m not sure ‘origin story, villain monologue and final showdown’ are enough – why isn’t this just a fantasy movie about a team of immortals? Is Highlander a superhero?
I always thought of superhero movies as specifically about Capital-S Superheroes rather than just anyone with powers. Someone who intentionally stays out of the limelight (as in Old Guard) is kinda the opposite of a Superhero, as I see it. What do other people think of as the definition of ‘superhero’?
This was a really fun movie, but what kicked it up a notch for me was that there were a couple major points where I was sure what story beats we were going to get, but things got subverted – for starters, I was sure Andy would die, setting up Nile to pick up where she left off in a sequel that wouldn’t have to budget for Charlize Theron-level money. The way that the betrayal was handled was really well done also – the traitor isn’t a villain, just misguided, and everyone handles it pretty maturely (like someone else said, they’re more disappointed than angry). For both this and Birds of Prey, I liked that there were little moments and grace notes that let you see that women were involved in the creative process. There’s no lurid “heroine getting dressed” scene on the plane in Old Guard, which almost every superhero movie has, and the quiet solidarity from the pharmacy employee, for example.
I do wish that Birds of Prey had just called Cassandra Cain something else. Because the character in the movie has very little in common with her comic counterpart.
Fair enough – I haven’t read the source material for either movie
If you have the time, Linkara did a retrospective on Cassandra Cain’s history.
Hardcore agree.Like, Marvel drastically changed some of their hero characters (perhaps most significantly Drax the Destroyer & Janet van Dyne), but they changed them in ways that will let them keep using those characters in stories that are at least in some way related to the comics. The BoP version of Cassandra Cain…absolutely cannot be used again for ANY of the comics version’s stories.
I’m just pretending she’s Cass Cain, some runaway kid from Gotham who has a common name. Not Cassandra Cain, daughter of Lady Shiva and David Cain, trained to be the world’s deadliest assassin but robbed of the ability of language as a result, who then of her own accord makes herself a hero, who is still out there somewhere. …the kid should’ve just been named Harper Row, honestly. We’re never getting Harper on the big screen, and her story’s basically done in the comics.
I was not a fan of this but did like the resolution to the betrayal.
Agreed. When time is all you have, that’s gonna be your currency.
Well put. 100% agreed. I hope we get more movies like these going forward.
i think there’s a case to be made that the new mutants metaphorically represents this year better, but would have been a very unfun piece to write, read and comment on.
a very unfun piece to write, read and comment onThe AV Club
great work!
You mention WW84 being released this year, but publish this article now?
The first of several Netflix cheques that Harry Melling would cash this year. Ironically, it was the chess miniseries (on paper the least noteworthy of the three) that turned into a cultural phenomenon.
Is it bad that I didn’t realize this was Age of Heroes and not A History of Violence until about the last paragraph? I don’t know whether it says more about me or this film. I do believe it could fit well in either category. Maybe that’s because all the violence seemed to have real weight, unlike most superhero films.
This movie is incredibly silly but I liked it all the same. Possibly because I’m a big fan of anything Charlize Theron does. Even when she mails it in, she’s good.
I have trouble with the title. The Old Guard did not “redefine” the blockbuster, because it’s not a blockbuster. There won’t be any blockbusters this year for reasons outside of the film industry. As to the movie itself, it was fine. There are worse ways to spend an evening, but nothing about it broke new ground or redefined much of anything. It also had kind of a half-finished feel to me. I would have preferred to see it as a series.
If you believe Netflix’s claim that 78 million households watched it (admittedly a big if), and assume that translates to about 100 million people, that puts it on par with, say, Frozen 2 or The Sixth Sense or Revenge Of The Sith as far as viewership in the first few months post-release. You can definitely argue that makes it a “blockbuster”.
But you would also have to believe that those people would have paid $12-15 bucks a piece to see it if you want to compare it to Frozen 2. I actually commented to my husband when we watched that it would have been awful in a theatre. It looks cheap. Again, it was fine for an evening when there was nothing better to do (which describes an awful lot of evenings when one is confined to one’s home), but it was definitely not event watching.
That bad, huh?
Good and bad are situation dependent. It was fine. I watched the whole thing and never felt like I was wasting my time. My husband had been very eager to see it because he is a Theron fanboy. His response was “that was OK.”
I was bored enough that I didn’t make it through, but I didn’t dislike it so maybe I will someday? That said, I felt the same way about the source material and that Rucka’s other unkillable warrior series Lazarus is more interesting.I should/shouldn’t probably admit that I don’t rate Theron as highly as most folks do. I liked Atomic Blonde, but I credit George Miller more for the success of Mad Max: Fury Road than seems to be the consensus, enough so that when a prequel was suggested I seem to be the only one not disappointed that Theron isn’t likely to be in it.
…but it wasn’t any good, unfortuantely.
At what point do they stop being mercenaries or whatever and decide to set up shell companies and sway the world towards progressive, anti-war ideologies?
Can something really be said to have ‘redefined’ a genre, when something like 9 out of 10 readers will just now be hearing about the movie’s existence?
I don’t know, this movie kind of strayed from Netflix’s usual formula. Characters only said “fuck” 46 times and the amount of gore was minimal.
I’ve seen some drab, lifeless superhero dreck before but this one really took the cake. We got about halfway and couldn’t bear to finish it. The very definition of tiresome.
I thought I’d seen some drab, bland, lifeless superhero dreck before but this really took the cake. Maybe the back half is better, but we couldn’t make it that far. Most superhero flicks are style over substance but I’ve never seen one without an iota of either before. D-
Slim pickings in 2020. The Old Guard was ‘okay’ I guess, but I don’t think it redefines much. Kingsman, The Losers, Red, etc, there are comic book movies that tread this ground of rag tag teams fighting organizations regardless of what the twist on the concept is. Personally, I would have waited for Wonder Woman ‘84, which still has the chance to save the Year of the ‘Rona and be the most important movie to come out. But Tom already talked about the first one, and I suppose variety is the spice of life. Even then, I’d begrudgingly choose Birds of Prey for some commentary about the continued viability of Batman spinoffs (how much Joker can we squeeze in there, too?) and the small ways DC is righting their ship.
As someone who isn’t very into Marvel movies, this year was really nice. It was quieter and less just completely dominated by the cultural monolith of Disney/Marvel. I thought Birds of Prey was an utter delight. So much fun and so well made. I also loved Old Guard. It’s great the two best superhero movies of 2020 were directed by women of color, and both were breaths of fresh air in the genre.I also like Bloodshot because it’s just smart enough to not be completely stupid and I’m a sucker for Vin Diesel. Give me simple action films rather than the big, noisier tentpoles.
Ugh Bloodshot. There are at least a half dozen other more interesting Valient characters that would make for a better adaptation. But I suppose this one got made because Vin Diesel.
The old guard was an awful movie, predictable plot, terrible dialogue, 90s stylized action. It’s one contribution was an underwritten gay couple in an action movie, big whoop. This would have been a good movie in 1991, not 2020. I feel like we are just handing out participation trophies now, I get there were slim pickings this year but man, let’s not scrape the barrel and call it cream.
The main flaw with Birds Of Prey is that Ewan McGregor went out like a little bitch. Like bro, why are you jobbing him out like The Brooklyn Brawler for dude?
I just don’t understand why Bruce hasn’t already crushed this little prick into hamburger by now. This is Gotham right?
Because he’s busy crying about his dead parents I guess.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Dark Knight (2008)Batman Begins (2005)The Avengers (2012)Superman (1978)Black Panther (2018)Wonder Woman (2017)The Incredibles (2004)Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014)Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)Spider-Man (2002)Batman (1989)Avengers: Endgame (2019)X-Men (2000)Blade (1998)Deadpool (2016)The Crow (1994)The Rocketeer (1991)Scott Pilgrim VS The World (2010)Darkman (1990)Batman Returns (1992)Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015)The Meteor Man (1993)The Old Guard (2020)Mystery Men (1999)Man Of Steel (2013)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Hulk (2003)The Phantom (1996)Watchmen (2009)Superman Returns (2006)From Hell (2001)Batman And Robin (1997)Batman Forever (1995)
Wow. Superhero movies suck.
To be honest I found Old Guard very middle of the road – like, it’s well done, no complaints, also not excited – however I watch more martial arts movies than superhero films, and I will definitely give it credit for getting us away from those friggin’ one-liners that seem to have become pervasive following Whedon’s run.
For those looking for a reason to hope in 2020: 6 Underground is apparently a Michael Bay/Ryan Reynolds joint that I didn’t even know existed until I read about it in this article almost a year after its initial release.I can see something, far off in the darkness! I think—I think it’s light!
I disagree. I don’t think it redefined anything. I believe it’s success is more of timing and circumstances. It came out when there really wasn’t much available, and at a time when a lot of people really needed an escape. I’m glad it found success, but I personally believe if there were no pandemic it wouldn’t have been successful. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t great. Just meh. I’ve seen better action. I’ve seen better choreographed fight scenes, and I’ve seen better storytelling all in one. But good on the director. I see the potential of doing even better than this. But sorry, I know I’m not the only one who didn’t hate, but definitely has no love for it like this article does. But I’m glad it has an audience. And I will hope that it’s eventual sequel will be better than the first installment. In the end, I do not look for movies or TV shows that redefine jack. Or does an original concept. I’m just looking for something that has an entertaining story and well executed plot. Articles like this just raises expectations too high. And now I’m worried Tom is going to be horribly disappointed on the sequel.
Will there be A History of Violence entry for this year, Tom?I feel asleep halfway watching Bloodshot. That film was so by the numbers and boring. Also who would know 2020 was the year that Ray Fisher’s mind broke.
This movie doesn’t deserve an article written about it. The action scenes just laid there. The fight choreographer could learn something from Extraction. Anyone who has watched any Asian action movies wouldn laugh at the lazy fight scenes. Three acting, dialogue and entire premise of the movie was pretty dumb also. If these guys are so good at be what they do because they’ve been doing it for such a long time, then why do they get shot to pieces on every mission? Sorry, but this movie is overrated.
We should probably recognize that at this point, Charlize Theron is the top female action start in American film. And in addition to the ones mentioned here, she was also in what was pretty brutal superhero with Will Smith, Hancock, which hit many of the same ideas as Old Guard of a kind of cursed immortality and reluctant superheroness. What we really need now is Charlize Theron to join Keanu Reeves in John Wick 4.
Is Harry Melling in EVERY movie or does it just feel that way?
Watched it last night after being reminded of it here and found it shockingly inert. The premise sounds like it would almost have to kick ass – you keep pumping bullets into her squibby flesh but she keeps coming at you with a battle axe – and it so resolutely does not. These immortal warriors are a candelabra away from lamenting the loneliness of the night.
Whether you liked it or not, I will be forever thankful for this movie being NEW content on the streaming services that was a decent movie not a niche series and not a crappy B, or poorly aged blockbuster that I have already seen. This was welcome viewing that I will not nitpick.
This movie was very watchable, except that it was about soldiers who had been around for decades and centuries and yet couldn’t do soldier stuff very well.
I didn’t care for this movie. it was kind of a highlander meets avengers knock off. Yes, the cast was stellar, but Theron does make turkeys every now and then (Aeon Flux?). The plot was kind of all over the place and the tone was too. There is a sequence in the middle where they show the past where one of their was basically tortured for eternity which was very serious and they state unequivocally this is the reason they must keep hidden and can never be captured alive, and like five minutes later two of them willingly, um, surrender and are captured? Then they make quips the whole time like it is funny..then guess what happens? They are tortured. That is when I turned it off.
I’m really stoked to see you revisit this column each year (especially this year, where the circumstances are so weird). I just with the Marvel Moment column would also resume; they only need 2 more entries to be caught up.
I found the Netflixness of this one to be a turnoff. As with all their stuff it seems like the premise and the cast are algorithmically generated, everything looks kind of dull and unpleasant, and there’s no satisfying payoff. It was an ok watch but nothing I would go back to.New Mutants was, visually, an affront to its source material and made some odd choices but I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I don’t know how you could adapt something as uniquely drawn as the Demon Bear Saga (from an art standpoint absolutely one of my favorite comics) and make it look like bog standard underlit superheroes whose powers all amount to glowy energy. It was like Zach Snyder via the CW in palette and composition respectively. That said, I mostly liked the characters and there’s a great twist that might not land for non-fans. It was a tight little movie, in and out in 94 minutes, and it I would’ve liked to see a sequel with bolder visual choices (Warlock! Warlock! Warlock!). It felt like it fit more with the Gifted (a great little x-men adjacent series that remixes characters and lore and got really good before it got cancelled) than the other x-films or marvel films. It would have been my pick for the year, but I’m pretty biased towards anything mutant related and decent and there wasn’t much competition (plus it benefited from low expectations). Birds of Prey was probably technically the better movie and I dug that one too.
It’s funny. I remember watching this movie, thinking it was “ok,” and then listening to the Old Guard episode of Blank Check where Griffin basically called people who disliked it idiots. So I watched it again, and I found it dull. Partly, it was the script. Rucka’s a wonderful writer, but this is not his finest work. It tries to cram the full first arc of his storyboard of a comic into this adaptation. Which doesn’t leave it any room to breathe.Add to that, well…Theron is sleepwalking throughout the film. You could excise everything about the “new” immortal character, who I liked, granted, and you wouldn’t miss a thing. The main villain has zero motivation beyond “profits!” and nothing to do. The betrayal was good. The romance between those two immortals was nice.The action after the initial sequence felt…TV-ish. Like, I could see flourishes that I enjoyed, but the director was hampered by how crammed the script was. I think she could do more in a sequel now that all the table-setting is out of the way.But my biggest gripe with the movie is that it’s not saying anything new. This movie about immortal warriors is treading the same ground as a hundred other immortal character movies. “Woe is us, we live a long time.”The only character whose motivations I understood? Booker. Booker was the best, even if he betrayed the team. Why? Charismatic. Clear motivation. Great backstory. He should’ve been the main villain. Cut out the pharmacy stuff or the ex-CIA guy.