Do We Need Origin Stories Anymore?

Do We Need Origin Stories Anymore?

I recently read that they're going to be starting the Spider-Man movie franchise over with a new actor. OK, fine. Toby Maguire's getting a bit old to be Peter Parker, I suppose. But I also read that they'll be starting over, and representing his origin story.

Come on.

We've seen him get munched on by the radioactive spider already. At this point, most people going to see a Spider-Man movie know the story, at least vaguely. And if they don't, it could be covered in a brief intro during the opening credits or a quick flashback. Heck, even a expository word-crawl could sum it up quickly and nicely, so we can get right to the super-villain punching, wall-crawling, web-swinging action, which is why we've gone to the movie in the first place.

Plus, I'm going to argue a strange point. I don't think that we even need origin stories anymore. Sure, in the 1960s, superheroes were still strange enough that if you were going to have a character with the ability to climb walls and sling webs, you needed to provide some kind of explanation or no one is going to understand what's going on. But superheroes are so ingrained in our culture now that I don't think it's needed. Not that origin stories are bad or superfluous. They're just not critically necessary. We can just accept that there's a guy in a suit with powers nowadays. (Look at the Incredibles, for example. Who cares what the origins of those characters are?) We're more interested, I think, in what happens after they get the powers.

This is particularly true of big name superheroes. Take the most obvious one as an example. Superman. Everyone in the Western World, and a great deal of the rest of the world, knows that they guy in red and blue with a cape and a big S on his chest can fly, lift cars, and bullets bounce off his chest. Some of those people know why, and some don't, but unless his Kryptonian origins are actually germane to the rest of the story, we don't really need to know his whole life story. Superman just does those things, that's who he is and what he does, and we don't actually need to know why.

You don't get James Bond's backstory in every bond film, for example. Or Sherlock Holmes'. Because it's not the point. In fact, Bond and Holmes aren't the point. The things they do (spy action and solving mysteries, respectively) are the point. You don't need to know where Ripley went to school in order to enjoy an Alien movie.