What happens if Superman bombs?
Uh, oh
What if the Superman movie comes out and bombs? – Comicbookmovie
March 12, 2025
This is clearly going to be a huge movie that lays some groundwork for a universe just being born into existence. This isn't Iron Man in 2008. This movie isn't being made with the mere possibility of creating a cinematic universe as a huge maybe. That's Superman's entire purpose...."
How many movies have there been that had this same purpose? When Doc Savage the Man of Bronze came out, the end credits promised the Doc would be back in "The Arch Enemy of Evil." This of course didn't happen because this 1975 movie bombed on its modest production budget of $2 million. Since then there's been many other films with the same purpose when they hit the theaters, that is, to spawn a sequel, such as Flash Gordon (1980), Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Masters of the Universe (1987), Green Lantern (2011), and a whole slew of the recent decade's worth of superhero movies, but all of these titles didn't make way for a sequel though their end credits claimed it was coming: because there was no money to pay for another one.
The obvious flaw is this: if the first film can't cut it with an audience, promising more films like it isn't exactly a winning marketing move. Most sequels come about because of demand not perceptions of future demand, but it is easy to understand how this method of film-making (minting copies) has reached a fever pitch because of the MCU movie library racking up $30+ billion in box office earnings, and every movie-making factory in Hollywood would like to duplicate that.
But even this isn't new, just a repeat of what happened in the wake of Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) which showed that serial-story adventure movies could make a bundle of money, but even that is just a repeat of the earlier phenomenon of Dracula, Frankenstein, Sherlock Homes, etc.
The one thing that makes this happen, I believe, is rather simple, however elusive: a film comes along that innovates a tired genre. Star Wars is an imitation of Flash Gordon (among other things) but it was innovative in it's time and it was in tune with 1977. The "fun" factor was organic to the performances of the leads and the script which contained the gags and one-liners. The special effects were not just state of the art for making miniature models and matte paintings look "real," but director George Lucas used all of that in a visually new way that wasn't static like the visual composition in, say, 2001 A Space Odyssey which was ahead of its time when it came out in 1968 but by 1977 had been copied quite a lot. Film audiences had already seen all of that film's "tricks" because of all the imitation in other films that followed it. But Star Wars was new with how Lucas visually showed the space ships, and he brought in a more sophisticated visual sense of just showing us familiar sci-fi scenes of distant planets and sci-fi technology and ray gun battles. Another example of this might be The Matrix (1999) which also radically renovated the sci-fi adventure film with a new visual library, not to mention it's paranoid script of a secret sub-world living behind a subverted upper world, essentially a restyling of the Time Machine's Morlocks and Eloi.
The superhero film genre is pooped out, and for Superman to make it in the coming July 2025 release, it will need to have an innovative heart.
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Original Page March 12, 2025