Is Disney going to shut down Marvel Comics?

[Ascended]

I don't understand how comics serve as a test ground for new stories and characters. Isn't the population that reads comics much smaller than the population that watches the movies? Just because a character or story doesn't resonate with comic book fans doesn't automatically mean it will resonate with general audiences. What am I missing?

You're not missing anything, exactly. It's true that comic book success or failure doesn't necessitate the same in larger media. But just because it's not a perfect ratio doesn't mean it doesnt have value.

We're a focus group. Sometimes the focus groups' opinion isn't reflected by the general population, but you can still gather valuable data there.

[CaptCleghorn]

You're not missing anything, exactly. It's true that comic book success or failure doesn't necessitate the same in larger media. But just because it's not a perfect ratio doesn't mean it doesnt have value.

We're a focus group. Sometimes the focus groups' opinion isn't reflected by the general population, but you can still gather valuable data there.

I'd suggest it's more an art than a science though. But your analysis looks good to me. From continuity obsessed fanboys, we get folks who happily stay through the credits for the final scene.

[capandkirby]

The population that reads comics is much smaller than the number of people who see movies, sure, but the same is true of the number of people who read books as opposed to the number of people who see movies. But you see the worth of novels being published, yes? And you understand that a popular novel can be adapted into a successful film that will reach millions of people who seldom, if ever, pick up a book, right?

So just apply the same thinking to comics and comic book adaptations.

Just because most moviegoers didn't read, say, Brubaker's Cap run, it didn't stop the Winter Soldier movie from resonating with them. And that movie only existed because the comics already told a tale that producers knew would make for a compelling, exciting film.

This is pretty much how they do it. One of the most popular means of measuring a movie's appeal with the general audience is Cinemascore (considered Hollywood's 'benchmark'). And how Cinemascore collects their data is that they have a list of the 25 biggest cities in the US, select five of those cities at random every weekend, and poll people coming out of the opening night of a film, gathering between 400-600 ballots per city. The ballots look like this...

cinemascore_ballot.jpg

Nielson, for television, also uses the statistic sampling method. They get around 5000 households to agree to be a representative sample for the entire US.

The only problem with using the statistic sampling method between comic readers and superhero films is that both Cinemascore and Nielson go out of their way to make sure that all demographics when it comes to age, gender and ethnicity are accurately represented in the polling, aka the sample numbers match percentages with the viewing demographic, so if the general audience of movies is 51% female and 49% male, the percentages for the representative sample will match that 51/49. I have a sneaking suspicion, and I could be wrong because I've never actually scene any data collected for this purpose, that comic readership is less diverse than a film's audience.

[JudicatorPrime]

I'm confident that Marvel Comics will still be here long after I'm dead and worm food.

[ed2962]

You're not missing anything, exactly. It's true that comic book success or failure doesn't necessitate the same in larger media. But just because it's not a perfect ratio doesn't mean it doesnt have value.

We're a focus group. Sometimes the focus groups' opinion isn't reflected by the general population, but you can still gather valuable data there.

I'd say it's less that comics fans are like a focus group and more that the comics themselves are more like "development" depts. You can hand a exec or investor a comic and show them, "This is what the story about and this is how it would look on screen."

[gurkle]

I don't understand how comics serve as a test ground for new stories and characters. Isn't the population that reads comics much smaller than the population that watches the movies? Just because a character or story doesn't resonate with comic book fans doesn't automatically mean it will resonate with general audiences. What am I missing?

The movies draw from recent comics a lot. As mentioned earlier in the thread, Thanos's henchmen in last year's Avengers: Infinity War were based characters who had been created for Jonathan Hickman's Avengers comics only a few years earlier; the character had never had henchmen before. Captain Marvel draws on some of her recent comics, the second Captain America movie was based on a story that revolutionized Cap's comics less than a decade before.

It doesn't even matter all that much if the new concepts resonate with readers (I don't think Thanos's Black Order were particularly popular). It's just that having new comics allows for testing out ideas that the screenwriters might later find useful.

[Red Robe Jaldari]

I don't understand how comics serve as a test ground for new stories and characters. Isn't the population that reads comics much smaller than the population that watches the movies? Just because a character or story doesn't resonate with comic book fans doesn't automatically mean it will resonate with general audiences. What am I missing?

Smaller and more coservative consumer base than the general movie aidience.

[blunt_eastwood]

Now that I think about it, there's was a really well done YouTube documentary that explained how movie studios don't really care about pleasing the core audiences, which in this context would be comic book fans, as much as attracting general audiences, because the core audiences would come no matter what.

That would explain why Marvel/Disney would want to use stories familiar to comic readers, but adapt them for general audiences. That way you "get" both audiences.

[capandkirby]

Now that I think about it, there's was a really well done YouTube documentary that explained how movie studios don't really care about pleasing the core audiences, which in this context would be comic book fans, as much as attracting general audiences, because the core audiences would come no matter what.

That would explain why Marvel/Disney would want to use stories familiar to comic readers, but adapt them for general audiences. That way you "get" both audiences.

There's an article on this: "The Cobra: Inside a Movie Marketer’s Playbook".

Excerpt: An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

*Edited to put "article" instead of "book". The article felt like a book it was so long and that's probably what my subconscious was thinking with the typo.

[Holt]

As small as the comics reading audience is, the research aspect also still comes into play from the concept of laziness. It's still much easier to craft a movie around a character who has a supporting cast, villains, stories to draw plot elements from and all that than it is to invent one out of whole cloth. It's not impossible, mind you. Ant-Man was so obscure that they went and flat out gave him other characters' villains in the sequel and created a good chunk of the supporting cast (like Luis and the other ex-cons) from scratch. But it's still preferable to have some basis to start with.

It's not a coincidence that Feige has pretty much all but confirmed Marvel Studios is planning a Kamala Khan movie after seeing how popular she's been in the comics. She's got pretty much everything you need to make a movie right there.

[Red Robe Jaldari]

As small as the comics reading audience is, the research aspect also still comes into play from the concept of laziness. It's still much easier to craft a movie around a character who has a supporting cast, villains, stories to draw plot elements from and all that than it is to invent one out of whole cloth. It's not impossible, mind you. Ant-Man was so obscure that they went and flat out gave him other characters' villains in the sequel and created a good chunk of the supporting cast (like Luis and the other ex-cons) from scratch. But it's still preferable to have some basis to start with.

It's not a coincidence that Feige has pretty much all but confirmed Marvel Studios is planning a Kamala Khan movie after seeing how popular she's been in the comics. She's got pretty much everything you need to make a movie right there.

It's not hard at all. Hollywood is filled with scripts that never made it to the screen. The writing is the cheapest part of the movie anyways considering the scale.

[Matt]

The idea that Disney would shut down Marvel is so utterly idiotic that I'm closing this thread.