Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), the last movie the Superheroes in Film class focused on, shows how superhero movies have progressed during over 20 years. CREDIT: Sony Pictures Releasing/Marvel Entertainment/Moviestore Collection

Film & TV

Superhero Movies Star in This COM Class

In the fight between good and evil, BU students take a critical approach

It’s a tale as old as time: good defeats evil, society is saved, order is restored. This summer, Boston University students put a new lens on one of Hollywood’s favorite genres: superhero movies. 

In the College of Communication class Superheroes in Film, Francis (Frankie) Vanaria (GRS’20), a College of Arts & Sciences lecturer in writing, helped students think differently about the action movies they love. From Blade (1998) to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Vanaria showed students the ways superhero movies have evolved to play into nationwide narratives around safety, how they are using new techniques, and how the long-standing competition between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics has been shaped over the years.

Students gathered twice a week, after reading a lecture and writing a thoughtful discussion post, to talk about the superhero movie they watched as homework. For film major Emma Garner (COM’25), talking about movies while their genres develop in real time is her favorite part. 

“That’s been a joy of mine [about] film school, and as a whole,” Garner says. “Watching things that come out and discussing them with professors and hearing their thoughts.”

Doing that with superhero movies is a special pleasure for Vanaria, especially as the narrative around these films has shifted. He says the general thought nowadays is that Marvel movies used to be good and are now bad and that DC movies have always been “kind of bad.”

“The history of this genre is a lot longer and a lot more consistent than maybe people mostly imagine,” Vanaria says. “My hope with this class is to move everyone away from this narrative of good and bad movies…you can personally like or dislike them, but for us, we’re trying to understand them as an industrial product and as a process of the industry, always recalibrating itself, always trying to find new audiences, always trying to reposition and reidentify.”

The course isn’t just for the movie-obsessed. Computer science major Sarah Altouq (CAS’28) says her superhero phase was a few years ago. She was spending the summer at home in Saudi Arabia, and she took the course, in part, because it meets virtually. 

“I am a fan of superhero movies, but I didn’t really know anything when it comes to the academic aspect of it,” Altouq says. “I only saw how these types of superhero movies were received in my cities… Listening to the other people in class, and Professor Vanaria as well, speak about the other movies, I really got a totally different perspective as to how these movies were received.” 

For a final project, Vanaria wanted something that would encourage his students to take a critical perspective, not just on the movies, but on the way they study them. So at the end of the course he had students create a hypothetical syllabus for how they would approach the subject matter. 

“There really is so much freedom they have to interpret these movies in different ways and to approach them from different angles,” Vanaria notes. “I think one of the frustrating things about how these movies are commonly discussed is that they’re very much flattened out, and the way that people talk about them usually ends up being, ‘Well, this movie represents this,’ and then the conversation closes on that.”

Vanaria hopes the syllabus assignment will change that for his students and open the genre up. As he sees it, superhero films are a corporate product, an art form, and a political statement. 

“My hope with the syllabus assignment is that [students] take especially that intellectual and emotionally running side of the genre and use it to think about themselves, think about what, in particular, draws them to the genre,” he says. “And use that to really, in a different way than a paper, articulate their own position and their own sense of identity as a consumer of these films.”

Altouq focused her syllabus on looking at these films through a feminist lens. For Garner, it’s all about Captain America—her childhood favorite. But for both, the best part of the class was hearing different perspectives on these films. Garner says this is due to Vanaria, who she says is a wonderful teacher.

“There’s just a lot of room to share your own opinions and thoughts, which I love, because I’ve got a lot of them,” she says. Vanaria “always makes sure that everyone has the room to express themselves, which is really, really awesome.”