The Marvel Cinematic Universe Needs a ‘Barbie’ — and ‘Fantastic Four’ Can Deliver It

Twitter may be dying a slow death by a thousand cry-laugh emojis, but the app’s observers of cinema are sharper than ever. “It’d be wild if Barbenheimer goes down in history as the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ that kills off the Superhero Era, which has been in its hair metal phase for a while now,” observed writer Aaron Hammond in a now-locked tweet back in July. More recently, in tweet that has since been deleted and reposted on the largely Nazi-free Xitter alternative Bluesky, writer Jessica Ritchey cheekily observed, “Thinking about it[,] it’s still kinda insane that Greta Gerwig’s revolutionary, paradigm shattering ideas that led to a hit movie are things like ‘We will build an actual set. We will fill it with props. Everyone’s costume will physically exist and not be put on in post.” Each technique Ritchey lists is a simple antidote to the nearly wall-to-wall use of post-production CGI by the cape contingent. 

And those capes are looking more tattered by the day. Since the end of its “Phase Three” — the culmination of its decade-long build to a big battle between all its heroes, led by the core Avengers team, and its big bad, the mad titan Thanos, aka what superhero comics readers refer to as a “jumping-off point” — the Marvel Cinematic Universe has seen diminishing box-office returns, critical notices, and fan interest alike. Films like Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania underperformed, while the shingle’s lineup of television shows on Disney+ have slid from the rapturously received but insular Wandavision to the widely loathed Secret Invasion, intended to be a launchpad for the MCU’s next movie, The Marvels. This bodes ill. 

Meanwhile, the DC Extended Universe has completely shit the bed, with one film after another bombing. One after the other, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, and Blue Beetle have all returned ghastly results at the box office. To be fair, it’s possible that this is less about the death of superheroes and more a DCEU-specific phenomenon. Perhaps DC fans are simply doing as they’ve effectively been told and waiting for new headmaster James Gunn’s reboot of the line before checking back in. But it’s hard to spin this kind of financial and critical cratering as good for business in either the short or long term.

Does it matter, though? I hate to be all “the superhero genre is dead, long live the superhero genre,” especially because I think said genre has exerted a baleful influence on blockbusters, B-movies, science fiction and fantasy, action, and all film generally. You’d be surprised, however, by just how quickly this particular genre can rebound. 

Batman and Robin, the campy Joel Schumacher/George Clooney joint widely credited with killing the superhero as a going concern at the theater, was released in 1998 — the very same year that the comparatively grounded and gritty Blade served as proof of concept that given the right script, aesthetic, and lead actor, even the most obscure comic-book character (Blade is a Marvel superhero and will soon be rebooted as such via the upcoming reboot starring Mahershala Ali) can make bank at the box office. There’s a direct line from director Stephen Norrington’s vampire hunter to the black-leather badassness of Bryan Singer’s X-Men — the movie that provided the initial ignition spark for the superhero boom back in 2000 — and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man — which counted on Blade’s evidence that audiences would go see a relatively unknown hero if said hero were presented in a sufficiently bitchin’ manner, thus inaugurating the MCU eight years later.

So despite the fact that the superhero genre as we know it now appears to be limping toward the grave, it isn’t too early to consider a rebirth. And it just so happens that the perfect midwife has been waiting in the wings for a century.

Jack Kirby is the visionary artist and writer who gave the Marvel Universe its look, its edge, its energy, and (though this is largely disputed by partisans of the company and its editor-turned-mascot Stan Lee) many of its core characters and seminal stories. Born to a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1917, Kirby was a legit antifascist — he was known for his willingness to fight American Nazi sympathizers in the streets of New York before shipping off to help liberate a concentration camp during World War II. He had a mind for melodrama, effectively inventing the romance comic in the 1950s, and a hand for art drawn with maximum impact in mind, whether in terms of wild combat or even wilder sci-fi/fantasy concepts. Put the two together and you have Marvel.

Take a look at Kirby’s rough-and-tumble Fantastic Four, the first of the bonafide Marvel Universe comics. The sturm und drang of the conflicted, conflicting family of heroes. The inhuman weirdness of their powers. (No elegant Superman-style flying for them — the flying guy’s body is on fire for god’s sake). The rubble-strewn power of their anti-monster combat. Put it next to the slick and staid art found in the Distinguished Competition’s titles starring the Flash, Batman et al, and you can see why elementary schoolers and college kids alike responded to the stuff the insane way they did.

What’s more, Kirby’s cosmic vistas — found in Marvel titles like FF andThe Mighty Thor as well as his later solo work for DC, now known collectively as the Fourth World Saga — echoed the rise of psychedelia, despite the fact that he was a family man from Long Island with no drugs in his system whatsoever. From his surreal collages to his cosmic entities to his trademark energy bubbles known as Kirby Krackle, his work thrums with the energy of a bygone age of titanic scientific, political, and cultural forces colliding into each other with the force of atoms, resulting in a fusion-like explosion of brightly colored madness. 

The authorship of the Marvel Universe may remain an hotly debated question, though books by writers such as Tom Spurgeon, Sean Howe, and Josie Riesman have long supported the contention of Kirby and his heirs that he played a far larger role in the shared world’s creation and continuation than his erswhile collaborator Stan Lee — and the corporate hagiography recently served up by Marvel’s current owner, Disney — would ever admit. Yet even the movies that deal most directly in Kirby-heavy concepts, Thor and Black Panther and the Fourth World elements of DC’s so-called Snyderverse, look and feel little like the King’s comics. Indeed, years spent in the superhero comic trenches have taught me that many contemporary readers see Kirby’s cartooning as dated, even clumsy, compared to the genre’s current practitioners. 

You know what else was seen as dated, even clumsy, compared to the techniques of current practitioners? Physical sets. Actual costumes. Establishing color and lighting on set rather than through post. Reviving an aesthetic associated with earlier times. 

Barbie, in other words. Everything that Barbie did, it had to do while swimming upstream against a 15-year-old current of CGI slop, set loose by the establishment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the arrival of its many clones and knockoffs. I think it’s fair to say this has worked out for Barbie, no?

And it just so happens that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Six is slated to kick off with a Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — the Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — called the Fantastic Four, with a film helmed by TV veteran Matt Shakman. At the risk of sounding like Kirby myself, do I need to draw you a picture here?

With nearly two years to go before Fantastic Four is supposed to debut — and likely longer, as the movie studios’ refusal to pay and treat writers and actors fairly causes delay after delay across their production and release schedules — Marvel honcho Kevin Feige and company have the perfect opportunity to recalibrate their computer-generated goop into something approaching the bold, stylized, tangible look of Barbie. And they can do this by capitalizing on the inimitable sensibilities of Kirby himself — the Kirby Krackle, the complex sci-fi machinery, the bold throwback costumes, the sense of bombast and grandeur that exists a million miles away from Whedonesque “so that just happened” nonchalance. 

This would not be without precedent in the superhero world. William Dozier and Lorenzo J. Semple’s beloved 1960s Batman TV series and its accompanying feature film used camp and pop-art techniques to create something as close to a moving comic book as possible. Richard Donner’s Superman soars on the strength of Christopher Reeve’s brilliant bifurcated performance as the Man of Steel and his alter ego Clark Kent, but also on its zeal for creating crisp and colorful superhero action that’s a deliberate return to a bygone era of adventure and romance storytelling. Tim Burton and Anton Furst created a lived-in gothic urban landscape in 1989’s Batman that appeared torn from the pages of a Frank Miller graphic novel; the approach led to subsequent artistic triumphs, from Burton’s own even more stylized Batman Returns to Warren Beatty’s comic-strop color experiment Dick Tracy to Bruce Timm and Paul Dini’s nouveau-noir cartoon Batman: The Animated Series.

There are more recent precedents to point to as well. Speed Racer may have been a flop and a sort of aesthetic cul-de-sac, but the hyperunrealism and sensational colors employed by the Wachowski Sisters in its making are an unmistakable influence on what Gerwig did with her Mattel heroine. Just this year, Jeff Rowe and Seth Rogen’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and the sequel film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, working with co-writers and co-producers Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, among others) proved that the hunger for superhero stories with a unique visual signature that hearkens back to more analog, more colorful forms of cartooning and animation is real. 

It’s not like Marvel has much to lose in experimenting. None of the four Fantastic Four feature films released to date are regarded as anything but embarrassments. Kirby’s son Neal, once placated by a deal with Marvel reached after Disney purchased the company and ended years of legal conflict overseen by the publisher’s notoriously penny-pinching, Trump-loving CEO Isaac Perlmutter, has been restive since the release of that ghoulish Stan Lee documentary; paying proper homage to their patriarch’s visual and storytelling genius would likely go a long way to patching up an important relationship. (Not as long as actually giving the guy the credit and legal recognition he’s due, but it’d be something, anyway.) And everything about this approach, from the retro production techniques and overall look to finally giving Kirby his flowers (provided it’s accompanied by a real adjustment to the official historical record), would win over critics long jaded by the MCU style.

But the bottom line is Barbie. Barbie is proof that you can do billion-dollar business by adapting a universally known children’s character using a combination of distinct, risk-taking visual sensibility and traditional movie magic. Your Ant-Men and Blue Beetles can’t hope to compete with that kind of artistic and aesthetic confidence, and indeed they haven’t. Fantastic Four gives Marvel, and the superhero genre in general, a chance to do both the bright thing and the right thing — to make a visually singular and stunning movie that honors the artistic contributions of men and women behind both the camera and the drawing table. Foremost among them: Kirby himself, the man without whom the entire superhero boom would not have been possible. Basing a movie on his singular aesthetic would be the tribute — if not the cash and the credit — the so-called King of Comics has long deserved.

Rumor has it that the approach being taken by Shakman’s Fantastic Four movie, currently due for release in 2025, is not that far removed from the vision articulated here. Over time, as the writing on the wall regarding evolving audience preferences threatens to blot out the brickwork behind it entirely, the movie may grow even closer to what the dying superhero genre really needs: a Barbie of one’s own. Greta Gerwig and Jack “King” Kirby have pointed the way forward. Will Marvel, and the Hollywood studios in general, have the courage to put on its big superhero boots and follow in those high-heeled pink footsteps?

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films and shows covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.