For me, the only real downside to Hollywood's current love-affair with superheroes is that along with the "official" adaptations it seems like everyone is pulling their "revisionist take" retreads out of mothballs to try for a greenlight. Every post-"Watchmen" variation on "what happens when they retire??" "What if they weren't as a good as we thought??" "What if they lived in the REAL world??" was done and re-done five times over by about 1998, but tell that to the geniuses who thought "Hancock" or "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" were a good idea.
But "Golden Age," unofficially "announced" on Deadline as a Matthew Vaughn project based on a yet-to-be-published Johnathan Ross comic, actually sounds worth being cautiously-optimistic about...
The idea, as described by Vaughn, refers to retired WWII-era heroes who're drafted back into service when their children's generation of heroes "screw up the world." So... "Kingdom Come," basically - but with an added element that makes me take notice: The rest-home supers will fight their children's mistakes alongside their superhero grandchildren - The Greatest Generation and Generation X versus The Boomers.
I'm kind of a sucker for "elderly/kid" teamups to begin with, but the potential for something uniquely "zetigeisty" in this intrigues me. There's a strong undercurrent with a lot of my generation (and the generation directly behind us) of feeling like we "relate" more strongly to our grandparents than our actual parents. Some of it is the mythologizing effects of media ("grammy and grampy defeated Hitler and were awesome, mom and dad were smelly hippies who couldn't win 'Nam") and some of it is probably the dramatic rise in two-income families and with them extended-grandparent-babysitting... but whatever it is it's there. Heck, it's not even ENTIRELY new to the genre - Carrie Kelley's whole arc in "Dark Knight Returns" was quite-directly about young teenager rejecting her Boomer parents - still getting stoned and musing about old rock songs well into parenthood - for Old Man Batman.
I want to see where they go with this.
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