When Sin City opened in 2005, casual moviegoers finally learned what comic book fans had known for 20 years: Frank Miller has a style all his own, and it’s certainly not for everybody.
Part hardboiled throwback, part stylized shoot 'em up, all wrapped in a gritty package of blood, crime and sex, the movie was a huge hit at the time, raking in $158 million on a $40 million budget.
For a comic book movie that is gleefully awash in cannibalism, rape and castration, and completely devoid of a superhero in bright tights, this was an impressive feat. Audiences weren’t turned off by Miller’s blood-caked views on the world; they were throwing money at it.
To say Hollywood wanted to be in the Frank Miller business would be an understatement: soon every property the writer ever touched was going into production, and it seemed that superhero movies and comic adaptations had to have a coating of Miller’s signature grit and grime to get the green light.
More than 10 years after Sin City's debut, though, Hollywood's obsession with the Frank Miller style has turned into self-parody, and now that Batman v Superman has been demolished by critics and fans, it might be time to look elsewhere for superpowered inspiration.
The Miller Touch
The recent Frank Miller trend started to bubble up earlier in the 2000s when Marvel’s Daredevil took its entire plot from his original comic book run. This continued into the production of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, which came out months after Sin City, and touted a plot that heavily borrowed from Miller’s "Batman: Year One."
Sin City is when everything changed, though. It wasn’t just adapted from Miller’s work — now the man himself became just as big as any of the film’s stars. He co-directed the movie, and the marketing of the film even went as far as to call it Frank Miller’s Sin City. He was front and center in the movie's publicity campaign and was the subject of countless essays, interviews and career retrospectives from the media. He was now a one-man brand.
Seeing "Frank Miller" on the marquee meant you were going to experience something dark, gritty and, of course, ultraviolent. It also ensured that you weren't going to be quite sure who to root for. The 300 Spartans weren’t pillars of virtue, Sin City’s Marv had plenty of skeletons in his closet and even his versions of Batman and Daredevil would regularly blur the line between criminal and hero until good and evil became interchangeable.
Somehow, this approach tapped into the mid-2000s zeitgeist, and with decades of Miller's comic book work for Hollywood to pull from, it seemed like it would never slow down.
Miller's stories look at the worst of humanity — the only part he sees at times — and amplifies it. He appeals to our inner cynic; the part of us we don’t want to admit is there, but the part that needs indulging every now and then. There's money to be made from misery, and studios were more than ready to profit from these world views.
300, The Wolverine, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Netflix’s Daredevil owe their existence to Miller’s onetime genius in one way or another. Some are almost beat-for-beat adaptations of his work, while others just have splashes of Miller-isms painted throughout. But as people would find out, Frank Miller comics are like a good bourbon: a sip or two can illuminate the world, but the whole bottle will leave you with a pounding headache.
Nolan probably straddled the line the best. For his Batman movies, he knew to take certain thematic and plot beats from "Year One" and The Dark Knight Returns, but he left the stylized violence and trumped-up Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue on the cutting room floor. The Wolverine and Netflix’s Daredevil, too, picked up the best bits from Miller, but also incorporated other inspirations from the characters’ history — and neither followed Miller’s visual or spoken style.
And for good reason….
Man Out Of Time
When 300 hit theaters back in 2007, many woefully pointed out how the sexist, xenophobic and homophobic aspects of Miller’s original source material made the jump to the screen; however, director Zack Snyder gave audiences enough groundbreaking eye candy for most to simply gloss over these issues. The movie made an obscene amount of money, and for studios, that's all the validation they needed.
In the years since 300 came out, though, culture has shifted drastically, and people aren’t as willing to sit back and accept racism, misogyny, brooding masculinity and quasi-fascism in their movies and TV shows.
The problem with adapting Miller’s work is that you’re working within the cultural framework of the time it was written: mainly Ronald Reagan’s 1980s. This was when movies and TV shows were littered with Death Wishes, Commandos and Rambos, and the comics reflected that. They were darker, more violent and less optimistic than they had been from the '40s to the '70s. While this bleak tone has its fans, and sometimes can reflect the overall mood of the world, it usually runs its course once companies shove dour and depressing down fans' throats with no alternative.
And now it seems like the Miller bubble is ready to burst again, just like it did after his original 1980s peak.
This might explain why the sequels 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For were both savaged by critics and didn’t make a dent at the box office — even with director Robert Rodriguez returning for the Sin City follow-up. And Batman v Superman, while breaking box office records opening weekend, has been met with absolutely dismal reviews from critics, comic fans and general audiences, and it could hurt DC's slate of movies moving forward. Batman and Superman are enough of a draw to get people into theaters on opening night, but the audience drop-off is already alarming.
The simple fact is that culture has moved on. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and throughout the Bush presidency, there might have been a call for the cynical, gun-toting antihero that played by his own rules, like Marv and Hartigan in Sin City. But look around: that just doesn't work in 2016.
What came across as groundbreaking in the '80s plays out like a bad parody now. When a testosterone-fueled Batman grumbles "Do you bleed? You will," in the Dawn of Justice trailers, it doesn't resemble the first meeting between two superhero icons. It comes off like a studio that is woefully stuck in the Iron Age of comics, when heroics were replaced by misguided masculinity and brooding was the national pastime.
Grim And Gritty In The Marvel Age
Since 2008, the Marvel Studios movies have acted like the anti-Frank Miller film — they’re bright and optimistic, without a hint of cynicism or unnecessary violence. They captured the mood of the public post-Bush and have stayed away from the grim and gritty cliches that Miller’s work seems to breed.
Heroes and villains are more well-defined, and the stories aim to leave you walking out of the theater with a smile on your face, rather than a frown that can compete with the Dark Knight's.
Of course, no one at Warner Bros. got this memo.
Not only did the studio gamble on the Miller vibe with Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman, they seem to be doubling down on their grim 'n' gritty approach to the superhero universe. Even Superman, the infinitely hopeful man of tomorrow, is portrayed as a self-doubting demigod that sees his job more as a burden than a destiny in these movies. Meanwhile, staring at him from across the ring is Captain America, another character that people thought was too old fashioned to ever be a mainstream attraction. It's obvious who the winner will be here.
This goes back to one of Miller’s more telling quotes, "The noir hero is a knight in blood-caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time." It's not Miller's fault that he likes his heroes to be morally questionable, but it is Warner's fault for believing that's the only way to present them.
Christopher Nolan proved that you can take comic books seriously and still deliver a critically acclaimed film series that also showcases timeless heroism. He also knew better than to go full Miller (you never go full Miller!). He knew these movies need to have hope and they need to have characters you can relate to and root for.
The problem is, Snyder — who understands the visual and tonal aspects of Miller’s work but doesn’t know where to stop — doesn’t seem to be changing direction anytime soon. He doesn’t view Miller as just one part of the 75-year history of DC; he views it as the company’s apex.
Sure, Batman v Superman will make a metric ton of money from curious moviegoers at first, but will this narrow view of the DC heroes be enough to drum up excitement for the rest of the cinematic universe? Do we want a darker, more serious Justice League? Will the Frank Miller-ization of this world poison the well?
Maybe back in 2005 we would have all been singing the praises of Batman v Superman. Now? It seems like another sign that audiences are finally ready to leave all that brooding behind.
