The race between Dwayne Johnson and Marvel is extremely close

Together, Marvel and DC released 6 blockbusters this year. There are also some series and shorter films like Werewolf by Night. You might think that superhero genre is still in a flowering phase in 2022. Man could think so if 2022 weren’t also the year Morbius and Black Adam were released.

Black Adam and Morbius brought us cheap action, predictable stories, miscast stars & awkward excuses

Morbius with Jared Leto and Black Adam with Dwayne Johnson undercut each other as if they were fighting for him Worst Superhero Movie Title of 2022 fight. They felt like having an artificial intelligence with the worn-out Marvel and DC clichés of the last few years – with the aim of creating the most desolate superhero blockbuster of all time. The question of which of the films moved tumber through the year is difficult to answer. We tried it in this article – it took 4 rounds.

Morbius vs Black Adam Round 1: Which movie is more formulaic?

Morbid followed its Sony Verse brother Venom, which celebrated success in 2018 with a reduced story, average effects and an overall impressive lack of ambition. The Morbius Calculus: The people out there want even more watch uninteresting and underdeveloped superhero movies forgotten on a hard drive in 2007. The problem: Venom developed an exciting trash tone with Tom Hardy in the leading role. Morbius only had the pompous Jared Leto, who never seemed to know what kind of movie he was in. Without the Tom Hardy vibe, Morbius was a bloodless skeleton, a car without gas, a complete miscalculation.

Black Adam: Dwayne Johnson’s cuddle and beam image is Black Adam’s biggest spoiler. Of course, the gloomy antihero can be refined into a tragic world savior. The character doesn’t even dare to step into troubling moral gray areas with the little toe. The Rock star power rewrites each character’s identity all by itself. We predicted the plot three years before it hit theaters. Despite it …

Point Morbius, 1 to 0

Morbius vs Black Adam Round 2: Who Has Worse Action?

The Final Battle Morbius vs “Matt Smith’s Character” takes place at night in front of New York’s skyscrapers. Of course, no one could have guessed that the dark bodies could hardly be recognized in front of the dark backdrop. That’s probably why it was decided in post-production that the two opponents have to pull colorful streaks behind them so that their movements can be perceived at least rudimentarily. The result was a murky pool of canvas sprinkled with muddy confetti. This completely failed visual conception is actually hard to beat.

If it weren’t for Black Adam, who pretends to have invented the playful bullet-time sequences we saw with Quicksilver in the X-Men movies 8 years ago. And when Dwayne Johnson fights faceless henchmen throughout the rest of the film, it has the kinetic impact of bashing balloons.

Tie: point Morbius, point Black Adam, 2 to 1

Round 3: Who has the more embarrassing post-credits scene?

Morbid lost in his own multiverse, conjuring up a rivalry between the (living) vampire and Spider-Man out of nowhere, and that’s not all of the crimes in this end credit fuck scene. The 5 minutes are one thing above all: A look at a chaotic studio brainstorming session on how to roll out the five-corner Spider-Man relationship of an otherwise consistently uninteresting Marvel character as broadly as possible. It’s just depressing.

What does Black Adam have to offer? The Black Adam credits scene, which Dwayne Johnson arbitrarily conjured up and hastily glued to the film, was intended to give the blockbuster one last marketing push – because that worked well with Spider-Man: No Way Home. Not only was the scene incredibly ugly, it was at least partly to blame for Henry Cavill’s end as Superman. This is unforgivable.

Point Black Adam, 2 to 2

Round 4 – tie-off: Which film dealt with its box office defeat more embarrassingly?

We need a bonus round. But actually that is the supreme discipline. Because both films processed their respective crash landings at the box office as undignified as 8-year-olds who lose in Ludo.

Morbid was sent back to cinemas after its unsuccessful first release, apparently because a meme campaign that propelled the Marvel film through social media timelines for weeks was misinterpreted. The movie world didn’t laugh with Morbius, it laughed at him. Of course, the disaster repeated itself. The Morbius, which was relatively cheap at $80 million, flopped again. Is it worse? yes it is possible

Black Adam, the $260 million film, fell far short of expectations. Hurt by the numbers, Dwayne Johnson first slid into the reply line of an IGN tweet to defend his film’s disastrous box office results. Then he apparently had a film page whitewash the disaster. The complete meltdown of a superstar, live on the Internet before the eyes of the film world. Congratulations, Dwayne Johnson: you can’t beat that.

Point Black Adam, 3 to 2

Dwayne Johnson’s DC vehicle wins the fight!

But to be clear: Of course there is passion in every film, including Black Adam. And it’s not at all to belittle the work of the cast, crew and director. Morbius and Black Adam did so poorly because they are maximally calculated and defaced studio products. They followed questionable trends, bending their characters for cameos, credits scenes and a few extra crushed dollars at the box office.

More successful and popular movies like DC’s The Batman and Marvel’s Black Panther 2 and even Thor 4 didn’t do that. They did their thing and trusted the creative visions of their writers and directors. If that realization catches on in the superhero world, then Black Adam and Morbius will have done some good after all.

Black Adam: The DCEU’s lowest point so far

Rarely have our colleagues from the FILMSTARTS podcast on screen love been as unanimous as with Black Adam and seldom has harsh criticism been expressed so unanimously: The blockbuster with Dwayne Johnson is the low point in the history of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU).

The screen love is the weekly cinema and film podcast of our colleagues from FILMSTARTS.

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