If you like superhero movies, you know the last few years blessed us with spectacular silver screen productions that kept us breathless and on our toes expecting the next box office hits, sequels and story developments. There is probably no Marvel or DC fan on the planet to not have seen the movie trailers for The Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier or fret around the concept of Ben Affleck playing the next Batman. Around here, we all love superheroes, some more than others, and we’re already booking tickets in the cinema’s front row to make sure we’re there when the rest of the announced blockbusters are released. However, since the movie list is quite impressive, we couldn’t helped but notice a strange phenomenon related to actors playing double superheroes.
What do we mean by that? Well, it’s not like the same superhero is given life on the screen by the same actor. Superman has been played by a famous list of celebrities, just like Batman was and so on. Again, nothing new. But there is also the case when the same actor plays two different characters, much to peoples’ confusion and, why not admitting it, much to their discontent. There are at least three actors playing double superheroes in our current times and we’ll take a look over each case to understand things better. Or not.
Chris Evans: Human Torch and Captain America
Chris Evans didn’t make so much of an impression back in 2007 with his interpretation of the Fantastic 4 hero Johnny Storm, and the movie was pretty bad too. And here we have him in 2011, playing the First Avenger, America’s beloved Captain. So riddle us this: do you associate Chris Evans with Johnny or Captain America? Are you saving money for The Winter Soldier or do you reminisce for the Human Torch? If we made a poll, we’d bet that fans everywhere would pick Evans for Captain America and leave the Torch blow on its own in the winds of oblivion. Now we don’t even think to judge the studios’ decision to take Evans on board for Marvel’s plans of taking total control over the cinema world, because we like Evans as the Captain, but really, weren’t there anybody else worthy enough of the role that they just had to pretend Evans wasn’t already cast in a fantasy series playing a hero?
Ben Affleck: Daredevil and Batman
People didn’t like Daredevil too much and if you read the news, they don’t like where Batman is going either in the hands of Ben Affleck. Among all the actors playing double superheroes, Affleck is the most disputed one and also the one who walks on the thinnest of ice surfaces: first, people remember him as Daredevil and frown upon him being chosen for the Dark Knight, second, the ones rooting for Christian Bale resent Affleck by default. He will have to prove his worth, but as superheroes go, for the sake of Batman, we hope Affleck will rise to the expectation.
Ryan Reynolds: Green Lantern and Deadpool
When we heard that there was finally going to be a movie starring Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds was about to play the insane character, we cheered for hours, as they couldn’t have made a better choice. Reynolds should be an amazing Deadpool and the movie should rock the movie industry. And then… it all came back, even if we tried to erase that memory from our brains: Reynolds was the Green Lantern and he was bad. The movie was bad and everything was lame from start to finish. So the dilemma persists: how can you dissociate a superhero from the actor playing him, when the said actor played terribly another hero in the past? Is Hollywood empty of young guys looking good in tights?
We didn’t dig in very deep, but we are convinced that there are other actors playing double superheroes. We don’t say that’s a bad thing, we only admit it is confusing and perhaps detrimental to the upcoming movies. The new Batman vs. Superman project is already in the spotlight and fans are more than willing to bash Affleck, while the future success of Deadpool is already questioned by the critics. So basically, Chris Evans has tremendous success with Captain America because nobody cared about the Fantastic 4; Affleck is bashed and trashed because a lot of people hated Daredevil, while Reynolds is swimming dangerous waters because Green Lantern was a huge disappointment even if Reynolds is a good actor.
