Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

Perhaps you remember that a couple summers ago, TOP GUN: MAVERICK absolutely slayed the box office for an insanely long period of time.

In case you don’t remember that… if you were, say, living under a mossy rock in East Timor, here are the raw numbers:

“Top Gun” Maverick” made $1.5 billion in global box office in 2022, including $718 million here in the States. Eye-popping for sure, but it’s not so much the numbers themselves that are impressive, billion dollar franchise movies like “Barbie” are not totally unheard of even in 2024… it’s how those dollars were made that is the story. “Top Gun: Maverick” had serious “legs” as we say in The Biz. While most franchise blockbusters make the majority of their money in the first few weeks of release, “Maverick” sat at the top of the box office pyramid for an absurdly long period of time. It was #1 from Memorial Day weekend all the way through Labor Day, something no other movie has done before (or since).

Obviously there are all kinds of valuable lessons for Hollywood to learn from the performance of “Maverick”, but the fact is that Hollywood is as allergic to introspection as the Bubble Boy is allergic to air, and so they have steadfastly refused to learn them.

Hollywood would prefer to tell themselves the seductive lie that “Maverick’s” success was a black swan event… that its success was purely a function of “Top Gun” the brand, maybe. But “Indiana Jones” is arguably a bigger brand than “Top Gun”, and that didn’t stop “The Dial of Destiny” from achieving a Dresden-level bombing at the box office.

They might also try to convince themselves that the presence of one of America’s last remaining movie star explains the movie’s success… though this does not explain why the presence of another popular generational movie star, Harrison Ford, did not save “Dial of Destiny” from disaster. Certainly Ford is twenty-years older than Cruise, but it’s hard to see how age alone could account for a $1 billion gap in worldwide boxoffice between the two films.

No… it seems clear to me that the critical difference that made “Top Gun: Maverick” a runaway success is something Hollywood is loathe to discuss, much less admit… that “Maverick” gave its audience, primarily men, exactly what they want…

It gave them a hero.

Men want to see heroes at the movies… forthright, steadfast, square-jawed courageous heroes with a side-business in looking good in cowboy hats. Heroes who kick in doors, punch the bad guys in the face first and ask questions later. Heroes who always manage to find time to kiss the girl before dashing off to find another villain to punch. They don’t want meek woe-is-me sad sacks who act like their best years are behind them. And here again it is useful to compare “Maverick” to “The Dial of Destiny”, Pete Mitchell to Indiana Jones.

The primary antagonist for both men is, of course, Father Time. Both characters are growing old, but they approach the unwinable battle with age in fundamentally different ways. While Indiana Jones dealt with the existential crisis of aging like a pathetic weenie, mostly drinking too much and staring off into the middle distance, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell fought the same battle with a certain “rage against the dying of the light” aplomb.

This is how I described the essential difference in my essay on the Era of the Joyless Blockbuster:

Indy is too old to be doing this, of course, but he’s also surly and morose. He drinks too much, he sits alone in bars and stares into his drink, he’s the old fuddy duddy who yells at the kids to turn down their music, and rather than write “love you” on their eyelids, his students now fall asleep in his classes.

Maverick, on the other hand, was heroic…

Maverick was portrayed as a man who was aging, but still at the top of his game. He was older, yes… more introspective and unsure of his place in the world certainly, but he was still the best pilot in the Navy and he was still a character who, for all his flaws, was very easy to love.

Which version do audiences, particularly male audiences, prefer?

I think the wildly different box office returns delivered by the two movies answers the question definitively.

There is no doubt, or at least there shouldn’t be, that men want to watch heroes be heroic on screen. Unfortunately for male audiences, there are fewer and fewer heroes to be found at the movies these days. This is because somewhere along the way, a radical cadre of instersectional social justice warriors decided that giving men what they want is bad… “toxic” in the lexicon of the modern activist. And so most of our best franchise heroes have been mothballed altogether, or laid low and done dirty in the manner of what was done to Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Arnold’s version of the Terminator.

In conjunction with ungracefully showing our favorite heroes the door with a swift kick in the rear for good measure, presumably so that they can be replaced with characters who are more appropriate for what The Critical Drinker refers to as “modern audiences”, the new male replacement heroes we’re being served up generally don’t make the grade.

The new Star Wars mainline movies are a great example. Unlike the first trilogy which had three co-equal leads, including Princess Leia who was exactly the kind of “strong female girlboss” Hollywood claims to want, yet seems to believe didn’t exist before 2020, the new Star Wars trilogy is clearly Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) franchise.

In a half-assed nod to the original triptich, Rey has been given two subordinate male leads, Poe Dameron and Finn, who have little agency and even littler voices, and who struggle to deliver the heroics we’re used to seeing in the Star Wars universe because the rules of modern Hollywood won’t let them. Their ideas are ignored, they are often sidelined to pointless side missions and when they do show initiative they are repimanded, to the detriment of the cause. Poe and Finn are men, you see, and it’s high time men took a back seat in Hollywood’s blockbusters… even if the entire Rebel fleet must be destroyed in order to do it.

More recently, 3 BODY PROBLEM, the current darling of the TV critics’ circuit, brought to you by the creators of GAME OF THRONES, suffers from the same problem. There are plenty of strong female characters in “3 Body Problem”, but the three main male characters are mopey overgrown man-boys who whine a lot, smoke too much pot, collect toys instead of accomplishments, play too many video games and who hardly ever lift a finger to change the course of their own lives.

To paraphrase a great (and highly subversive) line spoken by Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), which I quoted verbatim in my essay on the 1986 romantic comedy WORKING GIRL, The men in “3 Body Problem” behave like women imagine men would act if men were more like women.

There are a lot of reasons why Hollywood is struggling financially these days, and we have catalogued many of them here at The Congress over the years, but if you look back at the movies of the 80’s and 90’s, when Hollywood was making money hand-over-fist, the tables at Le Dome were always full, Movie Premeires at Mann’s Chinese shut down Hollywood Blvd 20 weeks a year and times were good, our movies screens were full of iconic larger-than-life heroes… John McClane, Harry Stamper, Jack Ryan, Eliot Ness, Frank Farmer, Riggs and Murtaugh, Mad Max, Rocky Balboa, John Rambo, John Spartan, Marion Cobretti, John Matrix, Conan, Harry Tasker, Dutch, Jack Traven, Captain Steven Hiller, Mike Lowrey and Marcus Murnett, Agents J & K, Connor MacLeod, Axel Foley, Jack Cates and Reggie Hammond, Tango & Cash, Stephen & Brian McCaffrey, Jack Burton, Richard Kimble & Sam Gerard, Snake Plisken, “Dalton”, Tom Sharky, Nico Toscani, Casey Ryback, Stanley Goodspeed & John Mason, Johnny Utah, Aragorn, Gandalf & Frodo, Robocop, Marty McFly, every Clint Eastwood character ever… and… and… and…

When you look at it that way, the answer to Hollywood’s problems seem so simple you want to slap your own forehead in disbelief… and if there’s one thing aspiring screenwriters in our audience should take away from these essays, it’s that by ignoring the desires of male audiences, Hollywood is creating an opportunity for you… a market niche, you might say.

We aren’t creating the next generation of iconic hereoes with which to anchor the blockbuster franchise movies of the future, and we need to be. Every now and then a 300 or a JOHN WICK or a FOUR BROTHERS slips through the cracks and becomes an unexpected sensation (if we’re lucky, THE FALL GUY will scratch that itch in a couple weeks). But for the most part, like an angry pre-teen in the grip of oppositional defiant disorder, Hollywood is refusing to cater to an enormous audience that is absolutely ravenous for heroes.

And therein lies an opportunity for the next great American screenwriter.

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