Superheroes and the New Sincerity Revival
If you’ve been keeping half an eye on genre cinema over the last couple of decades, you know the dominant tone has been irony. And not just wink-at-the-camera irony but full-blown, multiverse-collapsing, “Did we just make a meta-joke about our own intellectual property?” irony. The whole Deadpool’s franchise was basically built on it. Marvel weaponized it. And by the time we got to the Disney Plus TV shows, the genre was practically eating its own tail. Sincerity and earnestness have been out of style for some time now.
But something might be shifting in 2025.
With James Gunn’s Superman and the The Fantastic Four: First Steps both leaning into an aesthetic of earnestness, you’d be forgiven for feeling like you’ve seen this before. It is refreshing to see Gunn make this move, since his work on Guardians of the Galaxy is mostly in the ironic register, though occasionally those films dip their toes into the water of sincerity. Nonetheless, it all feels very familiar, because it is. Film scholar Jim Collins diagnosed it back in 1993, and proposed that these sincerity revivals come in cycles. Is kindness the new punk rock?
A Little History of Sincerity
In his essay “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” appearing as a chapter in the book, Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Collins maps out two dominant genre moves of the late ’80s and early ’90s:
Eclectic Irony: Films like Back to the Future III, Batman, and Blue Velvet that function as textual remix machines and thrive on intertextuality, pastiche, and genre-mashing.
New Sincerity: Films like Dances with Wolves, Field of Dreams, and Hook that, in Collins’s words, “attempt to reject [the array] altogether” and seek out a kind of lost purity. These are films that believe in something, and they want you to believe too.
Where irony winks, sincerity embraces. Distance, as the safe place where characters and audience can remain remote to sit back to snipe with snark, is collapsed into an uncomfortable closeness that requires tapping into a personal and moral register to solve the films’, albeit cosmic, problems.
So What’s Happening Now?
Here’s my hunch: Superman (2025) isn’t just another reboot. It’s a genre recalibration. James Gunn’s Superman isn’t brooding in an existential pit (Man of Steel, I’m looking at you), nor is he being deconstructed or “gritty-fied.” He’s kind. He’s hopeful. He wears primary colors without apology. He believes in people.
Meanwhile, Fantastic Four is leaning into its 1960s setting and not in an ironic Mad Men kind of way. Think family values, adventure-for-the-sake-of-adventure, cosmic awe, and sincerity despite the spandex.
Why is this happening again?
Because the wheel turns. Because after so many layers of irony, people crave something solid. Something unironic. Something good.
Collins reminds us that the “new sincerity” of the ’90s was also a response to media saturation. Back then, it was VHS tapes, cable TV, and blockbuster nostalgia. Now it’s streaming overload, AI content brain-rot, and the persistent hum of platform fatigue. The array may have gotten bigger, but so has the ache for meaning. Another version of Collin’s thesis made the rounds in the aftermath of 9/11, but it seems to me that this is more like what he saw in the 90’s. However, history never happens without history and that moment and our own current traumas may certainly have something to do with this too. See Roger Rosenblatt’s “The Age of Irony Comes to an End”, even though it didn’t because for a little while it did. That all has something to do with this too.
We may not be heading back to the cornfield of Field of Dreams, but maybe we are returning to something like belief. The belief looks like one that posits an unironic hero, and perhaps that kindness and personal commitment might be more powerful than cosmic, planet-eating beings, or the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. In stories that don’t flinch when they say the word “truth.” Sure, people with and without super-powers are flawed, but also they try to be better because we want to believe “better” is really out there if any of us have the courage to try and grab it.
Dustin Sells has a PhD in Screen Studies from Oklahoma State University. He likes everything from the grindhouse to the arthouse. Check out Dustin’s most recently viewed films on Letterboxd @DustinSells or follow him on Mastodon or Instagram.
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