Okay, it’s not the same street, but it’s close. For the past few years, Marvel has ditched space and moved their stories and heroes back to Earth, but not with a view of featuring interesting locations throughout the globe. The recent MCU slate has confined them to bland, formulaic, seen-it-a-billion-times streets in New York – and I, for one, am sick of it.
The ‘single street finale’ is quickly becoming a tiresome trope. It’s a wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road replacement for what a finale battle used to be: a showcase for the very best a film had to offer. Think Guardians of The Galaxy or the ending of Thor: Ragnarok for great examples of thrilling final acts.
But in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine staged their epic final fight on… a generic New York street. And the trailers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Marvel’s upcoming anti-hero team up movie, Thunderbolts*, feature a suspiciously similar-looking New York street. So, why are Marvel so infatuated with streets?
MARVEL’S STREET FIGHTER 2025
I don’t have a vendetta against a city-based finale, but not all city-based finales are created equal. From the few sequences we’re shown in the teaser trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, we’re treated to yet another doomed city – this time in the form of a retro-futuristic New York – with yet another appearance of ‘that’ street. Similar, too, is the Big Game Trailer for Thunderbolts*, where a team of Marvel (anti)heroes save the day on a further run-of-the-mill street. To the general public, this might induce a feeling of déjà vu.
Giving us an all-out space battle isn’t cheap, either. In the past Marvel has been more than willing to stump up the cash for James Gunn and the Russo Bros space-faring efforts, but those moves had an almost guaranteed box office return, especially the later Avengers films.
I think the interstellar bubble burst with The Marvels, a catastrophic financial failure for Marvel that probably caused the studio to retreat and rethink their approach to big battle scenes. The purse strings were definitely tightened on intergalactic set-pieces after that, with cheaper routes becoming an attractive alternative. So, dressing up a backlot in England to look like a generic New York street is where most of these movies are going.
REMEMBER THE BIG BLUE LIGHT?
The schtick used to be that, at the end of a superhero movie, we’d see a massive beam of light appear in the sky. It’s a convention that felt tired even at the time, and if you cast your mind back to the first Avengers movie – the current gold standard for a New York battle – we had a sweeping, large-scale war that featured different locations, moments with unknown characters, and a massive skybeam that really took the oomph out of everything else movie had going for it. It just wasn’t imaginative enough.
The Skybeam eventually became a laughing stock of comic book movies, with Marvel and DC both having to diversify their approach to finales if they were ever going to blossom into the titans they are today. Much like with their costly space battles, Marvel had to dutch the big blue light; the old jalopy had to be traded in for a shiny new model in the form of the signal street fight scene.
MARVEL GETS STREETWISE
As a fan of capes and yellow spandex, I take issue with a $210 million dollar movie pumping out yet another finale devoid of imagination. Yet, Marvel Studios has a proven track record of keeping their final battles earthbound of late. Even though The Fantastic Four are space explorers – their whole schtick is them acting like a small Star Trek crew – Marvel are confining them to Earth. We know it’s pricey to fake a trip to space, but if I see the FF battle Galactus in Times Square, I might want The Thing to punch me in the face.
All-in, The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts* have cost over $300 million, so Marvel and the titanic, money-stuffed Disney can afford to buy imagination, good writing, and the best looking space sets known to man. Scratch that, with a few more millions and a favour from Mr Spacex, Marvel could just send Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach into the stratosphere for real – now that sounds better than a New York street!
Images courtesy of Marvel Studios
