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posted by martyb on Friday November 09 2018, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the ends-justify-the-means? dept.

ArsTechnica:

It's superheroes and not their super-villain counterparts that we should really be afraid of. This idea has been explored in a number of superhero movies, including such diverse fare as The Incredibles, Watchmen, and the post-Sokovia adventures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In each, lawmakers shackle our protagonists in response to the collateral damage caused when they step in to save the day.

But perhaps collateral damage is not what we should be worried about. According to a new study, the "good guys" are actually significantly more violent than the antagonists they're trying to stop. These findings were presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Pennsylvania pediatrician Robert Olympia and his colleagues sat through 10 superhero movies released in 2015 and 2016, cataloging each specific act of violence and noting whether it was committed by a protagonist or villain.

As anyone who has sat through a recent summer superhero tentpole can attest, there is a lot of violence to catalogue—on the order of 23 acts per hour for the good guys, with just 18 violent acts per hour for the bad guys. And it is mostly guys—male characters were five times more likely to engage in violence than female characters.

Well, it's edgier that way.

[For the sake of discussion, here's a 3-minute clip on YouTube: Incredibles 2 Fight Scene in Full: Jack-Jack vs. Raccoon (Exclusive). How many violent acts do you count? --Ed.]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @10:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @10:34PM (#760117)

    To answer your questions, it's actually licensing issues that prevent SuperGirl from returning to the big screen.
    Even though DC took a different approach than Marvel.

    I say this because DC Characters exist explicitly in a multiverse. They took supers who were not moving comics and licensed them for exclusive use to TV, therefore these characters cannot be used in movies.
    But there is no "storytelling reason" that it has to be that way, the entire Arrowverse is this way due to licensing.

    Marvel TV characters on the other hand, exist in the same universe as their movie counterparts, with the exception being the XMen characters who were licensed to Fox.
    Which is probably why the two XMen related TV franchises (Legion and The Gifted) have no Xmen in them, except Polaris who is Magneto's daughter and the Stepford Cuckoos none of whom are unlikely to ever make it into an XMen movie.

    I'm not sure if you're aware but right now Supergirl has an active TV series starring Melissa Benoist that isn't terrible.

    Going back to my previous assertion about licensing. There are a couple of notable exceptions. The Flash was in the Justice League movie and Superman was in the Supergirl TV series.

    But the Flash of Justice League was already written into the movie before the Flash TV series debuted, so the Flash from the movies is a very different Flash than the one on TV.
    In fact it's been rumored that the movie Flash will have a run in with TV's Flash during the Flash solo movie. So Flash might be a bit of a wildcard here.

    Superman makes the occasional cameo on SuperGirl, but it's only briefly and he's there to highlight the differences in approach to crime fighting between SuperGirl and Superman, before he flies off to save the day somewhere else.
    The Superman on TV is a very, very different Superman than the one in the movies.

    But the multiverse is a real presence in the TV series from DC.
    The seasonal crossovers between arrowverse shows usually have to bring Supergirl into the universe shared by Flash and Arrow through some scientific gimmick.
    She cannot just fly there nor go there on a whim.

    However beyond those 2 exceptions, for 99% of it, the TV shows are for characters that are not licensed to movies and explicitly exist in a multiverse where they are the primary hero.
    Gotta roll in that dough somehow.