How long will super-hero movies be hot?

[WebLurker]

Happy thinking and if willing let me know if you find something.

Will do.

(One thing off the top of my head; I'm willing to give Rey's telekinesis a pass; the novel Ahsoka established that there are some Force sensitives who can just inherently use a specific skill, in the case of the novel, Ahsoka found a little girl who had a sort of Force-based Spidey sense. The reference book Star Wars: Made Easy established that Rey's telekinesis was used with zero training. It seems a reasonable assumption then that, like that little girl in Ahsoka, Rey has an inherent Force skill in telekinesis. Whether that makes sense in the context of the movies alone, I don't know -- although Luke did apparently self-taught himself the same skill himself in ESB -- but it is consistent with the franchise as a whole.)

Some of these guys are really lacking in analysing the comics they review like Diversity and Comics he doesn't even give a break down of the story he is reading and he has even read stuff out of context.

I've listed to D&C sometimes and have not found him to present arguments that are intellectually honest or made with critical thinking either.

One YouTuber I know gave the most moronic analysis of the Black Panther film after lambasting it for so many days before even seeing it and he doesn't even realise that not many will take him seriously because of it.

Didn't see that one. My go to for worst is a YouTuber named Douglas Ernst. He's something of an associate of Diversity & Comics and shares the same ideology (and suffers from some of the same problems in terms of analytical failure, but even worse, if at all possible). While I haven't seen anything from him about Black Panther, Ernst did review Star Wars: The Last Jedi unfavorably by taking stuff way out of context, used some pretty huge leaps of logic (including stuff that requires ignoring information from the movie), and, to use J.R.R. Tolkien's terminology, tried to passed off his applicability as the movie's official allegory. You can see the train wreck here, and that's just the tip of the iceberg; he did several other videos on the subject advocating a tin foil hat conspiracy that Disney was cracking down on critics of the movie (and thus suppressing the "truth" that TLJ was liberal propaganda and a bad movie).

I mean, I think everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I don't have any patience for the Kool-Aid drinkers who are militant that their echo chamber is the way reality works and try to force that on the rest of the world. Once the only conversation you'll accept is capitulation, there's no point to it.

[jbmasta]

*Looks at Black Panther's box office results and critical acclaim*

It's going to be awhile.

Out of last year's MCU films and Black Panther the one that's not done as well as the others with viewers seems to be Guardians Vol. 2. Still a good film but it feels like many aspects were retreading the first. Spider-Man Homecoming was very well received, Ragnarok isn't just the best Thor film in the MCU (hardly the most difficult thing to do) but it's definitely one of the notable entries in the MCU and Black Panther, well, that's raised the bar incredibly high.

And just look at the hype for Infinity War. Although Infinity War will have a Age of Ultron-type hurdle to rise above, in that there's a lot of expectation, and if viewers and critics don't feel that the expectation is met, then at best it'll be considered an expensive meh. Infinity War has to pay off 18 films that that have been released over the last ten years, and a storyline introduced six years ago that's been a bit slow up to this point tbh.

No doubt when this Infinity War storyline concludes and Disney need to work out another storyline they'll be up against both a film market saturated with superhero movies and the size and scope of the Infinity War storyline. How long can they juggle properties and characters new and old and retain their box office dominance while the superhero genre retains enough appeal in cinema goers? At what point will the cinematic entries of the MCU become sprawling enough that the best solution may be closing it out, at least for the movies?

[Confuzzled]

Once Disney buys Fox, the number released per year will decrease. Unless DC fills the gap.

The maximum number of superhero movies that Fox has released in a year has just been 2 so far. This year was supposed to buck that but then The New Mutants got pushed to next year. The next 2 years claim to have 3 films each but... let's just say the latest Twitter chatter on Deadpool 2 has me doubting whether those plans come into fruition now.

So Marvel needs to come out with only one extra FF/X-Men movie per year while DC (and Sony if their plans don't go awry) will more than make up for the rest. There's a good chance the number of superhero films per year will still increase even after the buyout of Fox.

[jbmasta]

Well the new Star Wars movies are more successful at the box office than the original trilogy or the prequels. So I'm guessing Rey, Finn, and Ren have at least a few fans.

Or that the fandom and marketing are accessible to a lot more people, particularly with the internet. Whether it's positive or negative people are still talking about Star Wars, and there are people who hate watch (and thus are buying a ticket if they're going to the cinema to do so). With higher ticket prices and exorbitant concession stand prices going to the movies is more of an event, so going with a group of friends to see the new Star Wars feels bigger than it otherwise might.

[Confuzzled]

I wonder if studios like Universal and Paramount that don't own rights to major superhero franchises will be interested in purchasing the movie rights to franchises from Valiant and Lion Forge. I could see Faith being a solid little hit.

[jbmasta]

Superhero movies are the current fad. It's like the when the James Bond movies came out everyone tried to cash in on it. There were secret agent movies and TV shows starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm,
James Coburn as Derek Flint , Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from UNCLE, Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson and Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott in I Spy.
Even parodies like Don Adams as Maxwell Smart in Get Smart.
It got so over saturated that people lost interest. There were spy films before and there have been after, but not like then. I think the same thing will happen to superhero movies. People will get tired
of them and the studios will go back to trickling out a few every once in a while instead of a half dozen a year like now.

Harry Potter sparked a trend of adapting children or young adult books into films, which through Hunger Games became a trend of young adult books set in post-apocalyptic settings. More often than not the attempted franchises flopped, with few getting to complete the series (Alex Pettyfer was in three of these), and with Maze Runner closing out on The Death Cure the final pages seem to have well and truly closed on this trend. Golden Compass is one of the books adapted in search of finding the next Harry Potter, but in trying to make it family friendly (it's a series where the church is antagonistic to the main characters) the soul was sucked out. Not to mention one of the protagonists in the second book spends about half of it with some of his fingers cut off and bleeding. Bet the kiddies will love that!

Shared universes is another fad. But when it's done badly, it's impossible to overlook. Last year The Mummy was designed by Universal to launch their Dark Universe, a shared universe of Universal monsters. And I mean designed, as in more hints to future installments than care in the plot of the film itself (Amazing Spider-Man 2 had the same problem with Sony's planned Sinister Six set-up). Then there's the Universal logo at the beginning turning into the Dark Universe logo. Since The Mummy proved a critical failure I'd be surprised if we see any more of this Dark Universe.

[jbmasta]

Not common?
Bond is still going.
A bunch of Bournes.
Atomic Blonde.
Red Sparrow.
Half of Black Panther.
The Kingsmen movies.
The Mission Impossible movies.
The November Man.

A whole bunch of great tv spy series...

They seem pretty common to me.

The film titled Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy playing a highly competent character.

[Colossus1980]

I wonder if studios like Universal and Paramount that don't own rights to major superhero franchises will be interested in purchasing the movie rights to franchises from Valiant and Lion Forge. I could see Faith being a solid little hit.

Currently Sony has partnered up with Valiant to make 5 films out of Bloodshot and Harbinger.

[Sutekh]

They may have dozens.
The Black Panther wasn't a breakout character until it broke out after Marvel decided to treat it as seriously as any of their other movies.
The Black Panther was not a breakout character before the movie came out. He was one of those cancelled over and over again characters you usually call failures.

Yeah. Marvel (and DC) have tons of characters, and have proven time and again that they can make tons of money on lesser-known comic characters like Star-Lord, Ant-Man, etc. They've got entire teams that haven't been touched, like the Champions, Nextwave, Agents of Atlas, Initiative, Power Pack, the Ultimates, etc.

Wonder Woman may indeed be DC's most iconic female character, but Black Panther was only one of several mid to high profile black characters in their roster, with Luke Cage, Storm, Misty Knight and / or Monica Rambeau all having potential to break out. DC's got a deep bench of characters as well, and is just as capable, in theory, of creating awesome movies based on characters other than the 'big seven' of the Justice League, with diverse options like Vixen and Katana, and plenty of straight white dudes like Booster Gold and Captain Atom.

I don't think that there's a built-in end when superhero movies will suddenly no longer be possible, as long as they are good, and DC, IMO, has barely even started yet. And Marvel gains access to the X-Men properties, that's just a whole new world of adventure they can put on the big screen.

There's no reason why this 'bubble' has to burst. It might, but I've liked comics for almost 50 years, and haven't suddenly hit comics fatigue and stopped buying them, so I'm not the person whose going to suddenly stop watching movies about them.

It's like saying that the bacon bubble is going to burst and I'm suddenly going to stop eating bacon. Not likely.

[Lee]

I think they'd be a lot hotter if movie tickets were $2 and printed on newsprint.

[ed2962]

I wonder. In all the talk we've all had over the years about when/whether the superhero movie bubble would burst, has anyone considered the impact of technology?

Back in the day, superhero movies were almost impossible to do from a technical standpoint. Can you imagine how bad Green Lantern would've looked in 1984? Now its just expensive. Perhaps the genre has never been a Hollywood staple because Hollywood lacked the ability to do it, not because there is no audience.

Some genres endure the ebb and flow of trends, bending when they have to but never disappearing. Perhaps superheroes are like that. Perhaps they'll just always be around now, and some years we'll see five or six, some years we'll see one. But there'll always be a new one on the horizon.

I think it's more a case of filmmakers back then not taking the genre seriously. Outside of Superman and Batman, a lot of them seemed to look at cape characters with disdain.

[ed2962]

Will do.

(One thing off the top of my head; I'm willing to give Rey's telekinesis a pass; the novel Ahsoka established that there are some Force sensitives who can just inherently use a specific skill, in the case of the novel, Ahsoka found a little girl who had a sort of Force-based Spidey sense. The reference book Star Wars: Made Easy established that Rey's telekinesis was used with zero training. It seems a reasonable assumption then that, like that little girl in Ahsoka, Rey has an inherent Force skill in telekinesis. Whether that makes sense in the context of the movies alone, I don't know -- although Luke did apparently self-taught himself the same skill himself in ESB -- but it is consistent with the franchise as a whole.)



I've listed to D&C sometimes and have not found him to present arguments that are intellectually honest or made with critical thinking either.



Didn't see that one. My go to for worst is a YouTuber named Douglas Ernst. He's something of an associate of Diversity & Comics and shares the same ideology (and suffers from some of the same problems in terms of analytical failure, but even worse, if at all possible). While I haven't seen anything from him about Black Panther, Ernst did review Star Wars: The Last Jedi unfavorably by taking stuff way out of context, used some pretty huge leaps of logic (including stuff that requires ignoring information from the movie), and, to use J.R.R. Tolkien's terminology, tried to passed off his applicability as the movie's official allegory. You can see the train wreck here, and that's just the tip of the iceberg; he did several other videos on the subject advocating a tin foil hat conspiracy that Disney was cracking down on critics of the movie (and thus suppressing the "truth" that TLJ was liberal propaganda and a bad movie).

I mean, I think everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I don't have any patience for the Kool-Aid drinkers who are militant that their echo chamber is the way reality works and try to force that on the rest of the world. Once the only conversation you'll accept is capitulation, there's no point to it.

I know who Dying Detective is referring to...it's a guy who isn't "officially" part of the Comicsgate crowd, but he's drank their kool-aid. He started hating on the Black Panther movie as soon as the first trailer dropped roughly a year ago. He's really deluded not just in terms of geek culture but also in terms of society and politics...like to a comedic degree.

Guys like DiC, Ernst, etc for all their talk about pandering do just that for their audience. Some of these guys are quite disingenuous but they know what they do gets them hits, which is why they'll do an hour attacking America Chavez instead of finding comics they like.

[The Dying Detective]

Will do.

(One thing off the top of my head; I'm willing to give Rey's telekinesis a pass; the novel Ahsoka established that there are some Force sensitives who can just inherently use a specific skill, in the case of the novel, Ahsoka found a little girl who had a sort of Force-based Spidey sense. The reference book Star Wars: Made Easy established that Rey's telekinesis was used with zero training. It seems a reasonable assumption then that, like that little girl in Ahsoka, Rey has an inherent Force skill in telekinesis. Whether that makes sense in the context of the movies alone, I don't know -- although Luke did apparently self-taught himself the same skill himself in ESB -- but it is consistent with the franchise as a whole.)

Thanks but isn't telekinesis something all Force users are able to do?

I've listed to D&C sometimes and have not found him to present arguments that are intellectually honest or made with critical thinking either.

Yeah what is this wrong with these people?

Didn't see that one. My go to for worst is a YouTuber named Douglas Ernst. He's something of an associate of Diversity & Comics and shares the same ideology (and suffers from some of the same problems in terms of analytical failure, but even worse, if at all possible). While I haven't seen anything from him about Black Panther, Ernst did review Star Wars: The Last Jedi unfavorably by taking stuff way out of context, used some pretty huge leaps of logic (including stuff that requires ignoring information from the movie), and, to use J.R.R. Tolkien's terminology, tried to passed off his applicability as the movie's official allegory. You can see the train wreck here, and that's just the tip of the iceberg; he did several other videos on the subject advocating a tin foil hat conspiracy that Disney was cracking down on critics of the movie (and thus suppressing the "truth" that TLJ was liberal propaganda and a bad movie).

I mean, I think everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I don't have any patience for the Kool-Aid drinkers who are militant that their echo chamber is the way reality works and try to force that on the rest of the world. Once the only conversation you'll accept is capitulation, there's no point to it.

My worst go to is Shawn James a writer who talks about issues in the comic book industry and the African-American community but he keeps committing himself to conducting miserable research and he's the one reviewed Black Panther and called T'Challa emasculated and accuses Marvel of an agenda. He even called the director a man from a single mother household who elevates women without researching his background. And throughout the days he has been saying blacks are all aflutter over Black Panther because they favour adaptations of characters created by white men and dislike characters created by their own kind while staunchly praising the old Blade movies while ignoring that Blade was created by white men. And thanks for the link I'll look into it. It's kind of funny when these Kool-Aid drinkers talk like the liberals live in echo chambers but they themselves are about the same. There's a difference between fact and fiction and these guys don't get it. They need to look into Star Wars lore more.

[Confuzzled]

YouTube reviewers are the worst because their job requirement is different to actually critiquing a film. They need to ensure they get a regular number of views and subscribers to maintain the flow of ad revenue so they need to "spice" up their content and turn reviewing into a circus act instead of a practice displaying knowledge of film and storytelling techniques.

Basically they are little more than clickbaits. Even the few good ones suffer from a tendency to prioritizing putting on an entertainment act to reviewing a film.

[Rincewind]

Or that the fandom and marketing are accessible to a lot more people, particularly with the internet. Whether it's positive or negative people are still talking about Star Wars, and there are people who hate watch (and thus are buying a ticket if they're going to the cinema to do so). With higher ticket prices and exorbitant concession stand prices going to the movies is more of an event, so going with a group of friends to see the new Star Wars feels bigger than it otherwise might.

That can be said about all movie franchises today. But Star Wars is still the most successful of them.