Rider wrote:
Lawrence Fechtenberger wrote:
Rider wrote:
Unless you make an incredibly good superhero movie you are going to fail at this point.  
   THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN was a success just a few months ago.  No one, its admirers included, has called it "incredibly good."
Yes let's pick one example and hold that up really high.  Should we go through the dozens of others that tanked, Jonha Hex, Cowboys and Aliens, John Carter, Green Lantern, Green Hornet --again waits for the strawman--,
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Jonha Hex, Cowboys and Aliens, John Carter, Green Lantern, Green Hornet --again waits for the strawman--, Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four
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In that last case, Green Hornet, an adaptation of a 1936 (hence pre-Superman) radio show focusing mostly on mundane crimes (racketeers in normal clothes, etc.), the excecution has more to do with its inclusion-it seems as if they had a Hero At Large/Kick-Ass style idea that they used this to project to piggyback on when they heard the studio had this property in development . Jonah Hex, too, merits inclusion as a "comic book movie" more for the execution; though a comic book first, in print Jonah Hex played as more of a mundane Western for most of its run. For the most part, Jonah Hex would not run into anything Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Buchanan, Longarm, The Trailsman or the Gunsmith would encounter. Oddly, just a few months after Jonah Hex came out, Josh Brolin, who starred as Hex, then appeared in a True Grit, whose reception suggested mundane Westerns can do well. If they had treated Jonah Hex similar to Road to Perdition and A History of Violence (both based on graphic novels, both without the paranormal or any stylistic callbacks to comic books) as just a property which has a source in the medium, but otherwise a regular example of its genre, it might have played as less tacky. 

Including John Carter as a "comic book movie" still seems a bit of stretch. I heard someone, while chatting on the bus (not in a collectibles store, not with someone in my age group, but a rather matronly middle aged person) compare it more to Gladiator and Stargate (of course, Stargate has had comic book adaptations, but I would not conclude that the person had that in mind). She did not compare it to Superman.  

If you do want to include John Carter as a "comic book movie", does the flipside apply? Then many of the franchises on this list which did not start as comic books could count as "comic book movies", since very few of them stand as mundane thrillers. (Of course, some of them, such as Transformers, have had comic book adaptations.) Pirates of the Carribean has the same sort of genre merge that the Jonah Hex film has, although in this case more with a Rafael Sabitini style historical adventure than Westerns.

http://www.smashcaptures.com/top-20-highest-grossing-movie-franchise-film-series-part-2/ (features the top ten)

http://www.smashcaptures.com/top-2-highest-groosing-movie-franchise-part-1/

Regarding the lesser performing Ghost Rider (2007) and The Fantastic Four (2005) mentioned upthead; you do know that both of those films received sequels in theaters with reasonable budgets? To do an interesting comparison with another trend, other than Percy Jackson, did any of the lesser performing Harry Potter bandwagon films have sequels?  

http://www.soundonsight.org/is-the-movie-going-audience-growing-up-and-can-hollywood-grow-up-with-it/

http://www.soundonsight.org/score-at-the-half-%e2%80%93%c2%a0hollywood%c2%a0-zero-audience-even-less/
Of course, as Bill Mesce notes (see first link; other link has similar overview) some of these films such as Fantastic Four that underperform at the box office have possibilities for merchandising and toys that more conventional thrillers generally do not, so one could consider that.  

Regarding the concept of a JLA film mentioned upthread, some people elsewhere have expressed concerns about unfavorable comparisions to the Avengers. Well, that concept keps reminding me of this video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/12/iron-man-batman-begins-ar_n_460296.html?


Last Edited By: Scathach80 Oct 7 12 4:23 AM. Edited 6 times.