There are 7,622,000,000 people in the world today, and not all of them are superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But even though rising population figures are good for box-office receipts, it is a real-world trend that has sparked alarm and controversy for decades. And, while it is still a somewhat peripheral concern in contemporary politics – unlike, say, climate change – overpopulation has nevertheless become the crisis du jour in modern blockbuster filmmaking. As a movie-plot issue, population crisis exists between a plausible future and an imagined dystopia, offering Hollywood a force of moral nuance that exceeds the brute power of pure evil’s wrecking balls.
The makers of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) actually grappled with a double-pronged population crisis in the latest instalment in the Marvel’s Avengers series. First, they had to ram dozens of standalone superheroes, from Doctor Strange to Black Panther, into a tolerable length of film, and second, only anxiety over population growth could provide sufficient moral complexity for the franchise’s big boss, Thanos.
“It’s a simple calculus,” Thanos declares with near Shakespearean panache, “This universe has finite resources … if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” Thanos is using the same reasoning as Bertrand Zobrist from Inferno (2016), adapted from the Dan Brown novel. “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who refuse to act in times of crisis. We have created our own hell on Earth,” he says from beyond the grave, having released a virus to deplete global populations, before taking his own life. “Expect the current population to be culled by half. The survivors will witness horrors unknown to this planet but I want them to know why, that this was our doing and this is our salvation. Now is the time.” Zobrist, like Thanos, is almost an anti-hero who accepts the necessity of doing bad in order to do good.
The trend is not just present in comic-book movies, nor simply as an explanation of untrammelled evil. Helga Luthersdottir, an academic specialising in superhero studies, says that the focus for plotlines is now “competition for limited resources”, with some movies depicting the aftermath of unchecked population growth
https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...population-cinema-ready-player-one-downsizing
The makers of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) actually grappled with a double-pronged population crisis in the latest instalment in the Marvel’s Avengers series. First, they had to ram dozens of standalone superheroes, from Doctor Strange to Black Panther, into a tolerable length of film, and second, only anxiety over population growth could provide sufficient moral complexity for the franchise’s big boss, Thanos.
“It’s a simple calculus,” Thanos declares with near Shakespearean panache, “This universe has finite resources … if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” Thanos is using the same reasoning as Bertrand Zobrist from Inferno (2016), adapted from the Dan Brown novel. “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who refuse to act in times of crisis. We have created our own hell on Earth,” he says from beyond the grave, having released a virus to deplete global populations, before taking his own life. “Expect the current population to be culled by half. The survivors will witness horrors unknown to this planet but I want them to know why, that this was our doing and this is our salvation. Now is the time.” Zobrist, like Thanos, is almost an anti-hero who accepts the necessity of doing bad in order to do good.
The trend is not just present in comic-book movies, nor simply as an explanation of untrammelled evil. Helga Luthersdottir, an academic specialising in superhero studies, says that the focus for plotlines is now “competition for limited resources”, with some movies depicting the aftermath of unchecked population growth
https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...population-cinema-ready-player-one-downsizing
