Brightburn: A Concept That Didn’t Take

Between Marvel’s rapidly growing universe and DC’s scrambling to catch up, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the superhero genre, while being one of the biggest continuous moneymakers in Hollywood, might also be starting to grate on people. After all, an origin story is still an origin story, no matter what kind of powers you throw into the mix or which relative you choose to kill. To make a superhero movie now, you have to have something special, something that will set your movie apart and make it feel different than what can feel a little formulaic coming from the larger companies. Into the Spider-Verse had an animation style reminiscent of comic books; Venom capitalized on an anti-hero (however the movie turned out); the current show The Boys focuses on superheroes who’ve been corrupted and must be kept under control. In a little bit of that thread, Brightburn asks a simple question: what if Superman was a bad person? What if, instead of being a hero for mankind, he was a danger to us all? As a premise, it’s not a bad one – the idea of Superman going dark isn’t exactly new, there is an excellent game series based around it – but this film seemed to get stuck at a bit of a crossroads on how to actually make the premise work. The concept is a horror superhero, but there was almost too much Superman, and not enough of an attempt to flesh out the concept to make it something new.