ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Western popular culture has been immersed in fantasy, arguably more than ever before. This fantasy takes many forms, from the hobbits and elves of Tolkien's Middle-earth to the vampires of Twilight or the zombies of The Walking Dead. These fantasies play a crucial role in the construction of identity within the multiple contradictions of late capitalist culture: “fantasy is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance” (Žižek 1989: 142). But among the large variety of cross-media fantasy figures and franchises, most of which are spearheaded by big Hollywood blockbusters, the superhero has maintained the most consistent degree of visibility and popularity in the early twenty-first century. Having found in digital cinema an appropriate vessel for this elaborate and reliably spectacular form of popular mythology, superheroes have reached a level of popularity that for the first time exceeds that of comic books’ “Golden Age” of the late 1930s and 1940s.
