Author Topic: Superhero Movies  (Read 3456 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline kimmy

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 5033
  • Location: Kim City BC
Re: Superhero Movies
« on: November 14, 2017, 09:37:54 pm »
It won't be a sudden stop, it'll be a gradual decline.   

For a while Twilight and The Hunger Games had inspired a whole bunch of imitators. For a while it worked, and it began to fade. The Hunger Games itself started experiencing declining returns as it continued... the last movie was still a big hit by any standard except its predecessors: it made $150 million less than the 2nd movie did.  Other movies in the genre slumped even harder.  The "Divergent" series was planned to have another movie, but the 3rd movie in the series sagged so badly that they didn't bother making another movie.  Stephanie Meyers tried to duplicate her "Twilight" success with a new franchise called "The Host"... but she only wrote one book in the series, and the movie tanked, and that was the end of it.  They had to make a "Mortal Instruments" movie franchise, but with the market already saturated with that kind of stuff, the film was a box office disaster and the planned sequels were cancelled. (the Mortal Instruments was instead rebooted as the "Shadowhunters" TV series, which I've written about here before, when I was writing about my morbid fascination with incredibly bad programs. Shadowhunters remains the single worst television series I've ever seen. Truly a masterwork, it's almost as if they said "you know, this is really shitty, but we need to try and make this even worse. Let's brainstorm what could turn this steaming piece of crap into total flaming dog diarrhea." But I digress.)

There's not going to be a day when they release a superhero movie and people say "wait, this is stupid" and nobody goes. It'll happen over a span of years.  As we already saw with Spiderman.  They made a bunch of Spiderman movies with Toby McGuire, then a few years later they decided to do a "reboot" and make a bunch more Spiderman movies with Andrew Garfield. Each made a little less than the last. And they fizzled out after a while.  They sold the rights back to Marvel/Disney, and by plugging the character into their "shared cinematic universe", they've revived interest in Spiderman for the time being.


And I think the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" concept has helped them avoid that pitfall. They might not make another Thor movie, or another Captain America or Iron Man movie. We'll see Thor and Cap and Iron Man again in the next Avengers movie, and after that who knows if they'll be back or not. But meanwhile they're using the popularity of their current crop of properties to build a next generation of characters that people aren't tired of yet.  We were introduced to "The Black Panther" in the last Avengers movie, and next year "The Black Panther" gets his own movie.

And the "Marvel" brand itself seems to have some marketing value. "Dr Strange" and "The Guardians of the Galaxy" hadn't previously appeared in any of the Marvel films, but audiences were willing to give them a chance, probably based to some degree on the established track record of previous Marvel films.  From "Iron Man" straight through to the current "Thor" release, almost all of these movies have all received highly positive reviews for delivering entertainment.

 -k
Paris - London - New York - Kim City