Superhero Movies
"Oversaturation" of Superhero properties – Motley Fool
Long dismissed as lowbrow, comic books are increasingly high finance. The intellectual properties contained within their pages are some of the most profitable pieces of the entertainment and merchandising businesses."
The article talks about comic books for awhile, but the real subject here is the high-earning world of the films. They ask, is "superhero fatigue setting in?" – I would say, remember that this same question was the dominant one (for example) when the expensive Green Lantern film of July 17, 2011 bombed at the box office. Green Hornet had come out in January and had under-performed, and when GL tanked it was the feeling maybe the rush on superhero films had ended. More evidence was that 2011 is also the year Thor, Captain America the First Avenger, and X-Men First Class came out, and while all three performed all right, none were blockbusters, so the feeling was the "fad" had peaked.
But then came 2012 and only three superhero films were released, one being The Avengers, which blew the doors off of theaters ($1.5 billion in earnings), effectively killed the question of "superhero fatigue" and set the model for franchise-making that has been followed since.
The proper conclusion looks to be simple and even obvious: when the ideas become stale and the CGI (an equivalent would be slick art in the books) dominate to compensate for idea paucity, the genre fades, and when new ideas (even if those ideas are just clever twists on older, forgotten ideas, regrown by a new generation to whom the ideas are actually fresh and fairly unknown) the genre gets re-awakened.
The principal that has governed comic book superheroes (whether its the paper products, TV or the films) is that original ways of showing the superhero "idea" that is attractive to the mass audience can "click" and generate intense interest from customers. The downside, simplified, is that it also launches an enormous army of imitators who begin repeating all of the new imaginative ideas until we've returned to a stage of dry repetition.
Perhaps the main failing for the industry and it's corporate handlers is that a strategy of just doing what's come before fits with the safety paradigm of corporate thinking, followed by the corollary that the way to sucker the audience is to embellish the tried-and-true better and make it shinier, can only hold the attention for a short time and then, well, "new" stories seem as familiar as "old" stories and the audience will no longer pay attention. And that doesn't even calculate the other burden of new ideas in any creative field: failure to connect to the audience.
Perhaps the upside to this double-whammy of failure combined with the weary attention span of the 21st century audience "that's seen it all" so that when when something appears that is clever, creative, and however crudely fashioned, powerful, will snap attention to itself because it contrasts so readily against what's surrounding it.
Comic Book Movies
The Coming Comic Book Movies 2023-2026
Top Earning Comic Book Superhero Movies
Screen Reviews
Short Review: She-Hulk, Attorney-at-Law
Fast review: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves – a Film with antecedents – Harry Potter plus Guardians of the Galaxy plus Lord of the Rings, etc.
Fast review: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves – a Film with antecedents – Harry Potter plus Guardians of the Galaxy plus Lord of the Rings, etc.
Comic Book Movies
The Coming Comic Book Movies 2023-2026
Top Earning Comic Book Superhero Movies
Screen Reviews
Short Review: She-Hulk, Attorney-at-Law
Fast review: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves – a Film with antecedents – Harry Potter plus Guardians of the Galaxy plus Lord of the Rings, etc.
Fast review: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves – a Film with antecedents – Harry Potter plus Guardians of the Galaxy plus Lord of the Rings, etc.
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Original Page July 28, 2021 | Updated April 3, 2023