Why did comic book movies fare so badly before 2000's? Pretty much all of them bar the first Superman film and the three first Batman films failed and X-men and Spider-man were stuck in a development hell for nearly a decade. Note that most of these characters were known to the normies for decades. There were exceptions (The Mask, MIB), but they were nothing like the original.Capeshit's sudden popularity in the 2000's is especially baffling since this genre had to compete with fantasy films (Potter, LOTR, Narnia) which offered pretty much the same.
>>155665057The Tobey Maguire Spiderman unironically set all this shit into motion. You probably weren't alive then, but I'm here to say, this shit would never have happened if the original movie spiderman hadn't exploded like a nuclear weapon over the culture. This was before the internet really took off, too. So yeah, it was almost like a mini-Titanic cultural event. Aaaaaall the capeshit we got after that was because they were all trying to be Spiderman. That the second one exploded as well, and war arguably even better, only fanned the flames.
Has Todd McFarlane ever tried to take credit? It seems like something he’d do.
>>155665057Special effects were much more expensive and time-consuming which put heavy limitations on what and how superheroes could be adapted.
superman 2 did fine too.the renaissance began with blade in 1998.
>>155665057Superman 2 made a shitton of money, just not as much as the first one; the background of those movies that the guys making them, the Salkinds, really liked money and really hated spending money so when Donner convinced them they'd make money they let him work, but then fired him before it was done because they got edgy about the moneythat's why Superman and Superman II share so much footage - not really Donner's choice since the Donner Cut of II would still have had recaps even if it released as originally planned, but because the Salkinds liked to film the sequels back to back so that they could re-use footagein fact, every performer contract since the mid 1970s has had what's called a "Salkind clause" in it which states if their scene gets used in two separate movies, they will get paid twice for that performance - this came about after the Salkinds tried to screw everybody on the Three Musketeers movies (which were popular, and to be clear, they didn't need to screw anybody on) by paying them once and reusing their scenes in the sequel>>155665445this is also true and it shows even into the Dark Knight movies and beyond with Batman's cowl>>155665329there's an interview that Hugh Jackman did with Willem Dafoe (when Jackman was supposedly retiring from Wolverine with the Logan movie, or maybe even the one before that) where you can see Jackman suddenly realize he's taking all the credit for the MCU becoming popular by claiming the Fox-Men kicked all that off, and Willem Dafoe, who's a lot classier than outright saying hey no, shut up, just asks "what year was that" like he genuinely doesn't remember (which to be fair I mean who cares what year any X-Men movie came out) and Jackman immediately backs down and apologizesfun
>>155665057Sort of the same issue as today, loads of directors hated the medium and did not want to fully commit to making an adaptation. They were against costumes or stunts, especially for villains. They were willing to have a hero around but did not want some costumed villain on screen. So for a decade Wonder Woman and Hulk fought mafia and corrupt cops. Batman 89 really proved a superhero movie can be a serious film that grabs even normie attention. But even then most studios were not willing to really do a Superhero thing, most 90s adaptations were lesser known stuff like Mask, Mystery Men, Tank Girl, etc.It was the 00s before cgi looked good enough to have a character fly or bounce around on rooftops. X-Men was more of a test to see if it made for a good movie, but Raimi's Spider-Man proved it can look good and attracts an audience.
>>155665057cg special effects just got better enough to make it more affordable compared to the 90sMarvel had problems with various studios (read up on how troubled the Spider-Man movie production was in the 90s; Cameron was supposed to work on that but legal battles took too long and he decided to leave and do his own thing) and their own bankruptcy in the 90s till Blade sort-of kicked things off, then the first X-Men surprisingly did well and then Spider-Man did massively well
>>155665329>The Tobey Maguire Spiderman unironically set all this shit into motionNo, we had X-Men two years before that. Blade even before that. Shadow, Mask, Men in Black (yes, it's based on a comic book), and even Phantom before that. The Tim Burton Batman movies before that. I don't remember if there was anything before but probably not.
>>155667077>we had X-Men two years before thatAnd it didn't make anywhere close to what Spidey made.
>>155667063>cg special effects just got better enough to make it more affordable compared to the 90sI remember there was a blurb that kept getting repeated throughout the 90's that the bean counters figured out that Fantastic Four would cost four million dollars (one million per character) every minute of screen-time due to all four of the team needing expensive CG to be realized, meaning a 90 minute movie would be estimated to cost $360,000,000.
>>155667077>>155667191In the mind of a studio executive, X-Men could've just been a fluke. Spider-Man's success was proof that there was actual demand for more.
>>155667077Burton Batman did massively well, but then Batman Returns ran into some controversy, Joel Schumacher took over as director, Batman Forever did pretty well, but then the whole series ground to a halt with Batman and Robin. Remember that it took eight years until a new Batman film after thatThe Shadow didn't do well at the box office (the budget was $40 million and the box office it got was $48 million). The appreciation it got came way laterThe Phantom was also a box office flop.The Mask was a success, but it never got a sequel (mainly because at the time Jim Carrey just refused to do a sequel). Dark Horse's other forays into film in the 90s definitely didn't have the same success.Men in Black did well but it didn't exactly open the door for other indie comicsBlade did well in the sense it got $131 million on a $45 million budget, X-Men did better with $296.3 million on a $75 million budget, but Spider-Man did $826.9 million on a $139 million budget.Blade was probably the first Marvel film that wasn't a box office flop (unless you count Men in Black by way of Malibu's rights being owned by Marvel) but Spider-Man's success was more significant in that it signaled to Hollywood that Marvel characters could be massive box office hits
>>155667275>In the mind of a studio executive, X-Men could've just been a fluke.This. Plus if X-Men flopped, then the takeaways might've been>don't do superhero teams>Blade did well but X-Men didn't, maybe the audience prefers more supernatural than superhero
>>155667394Blade's success was more a result of dark, slick, R-rated sci-fi being popular in the late-90's/Y2K, stuff like Matrix, Underworld, etc than the fact it was initially a Marvel comic. I think most people that saw Blade just thought it was a cool, dark action horror film.
>>155665057>>155665691The thing is most people wouldn’t consider MIB, The Mask, or even Blade to be “comic-book” movies because the medium is so closely associated with superheroes. There are plenty of adaptations of graphic novels, ranging from award-winning works like Road to Perdition, Ghost World, and The Death of Stalin to more generic action or romance movies like RED and The Losers. The thing is most of these films aren’t particularly “comic-booky,” so people don’t even realize they’re based on comics in the first place.
>>155667527Blade is incredibly comic booky, but I sort of get what you mean. I think you can draw a straight line between Blade and the black leather version of the X-Men costumes (the line goes through a little box with the word MATRIX in it).
>>155667740Do you mean underneath, not through?
>>155665057>>155667043This board and nerds/fanboys, etc., in general - misunderstand so much about Hollywood and entertainment that it's not even funny.I was reading comic books and watching cartoons growing up and still do both today. But I also grew up in and around the business edges of the entertainment business and so many things that get written on /co (or elsewhere) isn't so much absurd and off the mark, that it is genuinely absurd.A great example is the Snyder Cultists who are back with their REEstore shit since they managed to be 'successful' with their REElease crap. So they now think Gunn will be fired tomorrow and Snyder will be back by the first if not next week, and Henry will be literally donning the suit in 2027's Man of Tomorrow. But David Ellison doesn't care and certainly his father and the Saudi's don't or won't care about funny books, spander heroes, DEI or anything else. The biggest impact in that particular case is going to be the debt. People don't take it into account, but a huge factor in the Star Wars and MCU movies being so reductive is the massive debt that Disney has and that they incurred by swallowing Fox. The Deadpool and Wolverine, no matter how entertaining, was reductive and a cash grab because that was the only way it was going to get made. Disney today and Disney of the past 2-5 years would never have green-lit the first DP movie or anything else that's remotely different or interesting (or violent). The only movies that try anything different are the Sony financed Spider-Man movies because Sony doesn't have massive debt. Where the SM movies suck or are derivative it's because Sony, after the TASM movies, and their own stupid desire to build a cinematic universe, lost their nerve and sold out to Feige and the MCU. tl;dr these threads are a waste of space
>>155665329AND THEY SAY THAT A HERO CAN SAVE US IM NOT GONNA STAND HERE AND WAIT
>>155669473Whatever
>>155665057Audiences /critics had higher standards back then plus it was probably prohibitively expensive to spam cgi for everything (and it didn’t look great)
