A new, more colourful era of comic-book movies beckons this year, with a slate of movies centred on female superheroes and directed by women, including DC’s Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984, and Marvel’s Black Widow and Eternals. But it is not just a change of perspective; things are literally getting more colourful.
Just check out the trailer for Birds of Prey: compared to its gloom-laden DC predecessors, it is a riot of colour. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn sets the tone, from her pink-and-blue bunches to her neon pink-and-gold wardrobe. And that brightness is carried through to the locations, the accessories, the lighting, the set-pieces (a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes homage). Even the explosions are more colourful. It is ostensibly set in the same shadowy Gotham City that Batman and co skulk through, but visually it is a different universe. It is a reminder that, for all their spectacular success, comic-book movies have often been dull as ditchwater to look at.
Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman 1984 also looks like a departure from the DC house style, which was largely set by Zack Snyder, a visual stylist of the “any colour you like so long as it’s black” school. In the Snyder era, Wonder Woman was dressed in a dulled-down version of her traditional red-and-blue outfit, but in the poster for 1984 (out in June), she sports resplendent golden armour, reflecting a vibrant backdrop of rippled rainbow hues. Hey, it’s set in the 80s; nobody had brightness controls back then.
If DC’s universe is traditionally dark and drab, Marvel’s is even worse. It is a realm of flat, washed-out greyness, with no proper blacks and barely any bright colours. There are exceptions (the psychedelic realms of Doctor Strange, the wacky Thor: Ragnarok) but most corners of the Marvel universe look like foggy car parks. Some have blamed this dullness on digital cinematography and bad colour grading, but I suspect it goes deeper than that. Early comic books were printed with just four colours, which looked garish when put on the screen (cartoonish, even, as with Warren Beatty’s primary-coloured Dick Tracy). Modern comic-book movies strive for a semblance of “realism”, as if they are happening outside right now, which calls for a newsier, grittier colour palette.
Birds of Prey re-embraces that playful cartoonishness, and it is refreshing. You could see a similar vibrancy in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, whose neon-accented visuals drew on street art as well as comic books. Another early style cue might have been the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (2008), whose full-spectrum visuals have earned it a cult following. The aesthetic vibrancy is of a piece with the fresh outlook. If this really is a new era, it’s looking the part.
