Box Office Mojo reports that, in the midst of what is probably the most crowded summer yet for movies inspired by comic books, the genre is failing to deliver out and out hits.
“While comic book movies continue to pack a potent punch for genre fare, it’s becoming more difficult to generate a transcendent hit like ‘Batman Begins’ or ‘Iron Man,’ much less a box office sensation like ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘Spider-Man.’”
It’s no secret why: there are too many of them and, for the most part, they’re not very good. I count myself as a comic book partisan, and I’m almost always happy to see one of the characters from my childhood make it to the big screen, but for major studios to release four major adaptations — “Thor,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Green Lantern” and “Captain America” — within a single summer is just unrealistic.
Two years ago, in a post about “The Dark Knight,” I compared the contemporary super-hero actioner to the Hollywood western. Like that once-dominant genre, super-hero films get little respect today but, I argued, they’ll one day become a routine vehicle for serious artistic ambitions. I still think that’s true, but the western-ization of comic book movies is happening on another level: they’re becoming commoditized and stripped of any meaningful uniqueness.
Read the Box Office Mojo write-up here.
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