The Comic Book Genre – No Longer Just for the Nerds
The future of comic book profit seems to be closely tied into the roots of it’s movie franchises. Somewhere along the way, we’ve gone from the comic book genre being loved by a niche group of nerds to a mainstream interest of today’s movie going audience, both child and adult.
It’s important to understand that most of these people lining up to see The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises on opening night will be no more inclined to go to their local comic book shop and drop money on the new issue of Avengers vs X-Men now than they were before comic book movies became our annual summer blockbusters. However, we can’t deny that the addition of these luke-warm fans does help keep the comic book world afloat in a declining age.
In the midst of this hype, a new worry emerges –
are we reaching our limit on what we can do with comic book movies?
I think we can agree that Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America were used almost as advertisements for The Avengers. I would argue that some of the movies even suffered a bit in order to unnaturally tie a mention of The Avengers in (Iron Man 2, I’m looking at you). But now The Avengers has come and gone in a blaze of glory and we’re back to square one – using Iron Man 3, Thor 2 and Captain America 2 for another build up to a second Avengers movie?
At what point do the normies who don’t love these characters on a deeper level get tired of that dance? There is certainly no shortage of storylines and characters for Marvel and DC to come out with a movie per month for the next decade, but making films of the characters mainstream enough to draw a non-nerdy audience is getting tapped out, for Marvel in particular. They talk of movies for Dr. Strange, Ant-Man, Black Panther and… Guardians of the Galaxy??, but the majority of the audience they have for The Avengers will look at you with a blank stare if you mention any of those names.
DC, while not being able to break out of their Batman-only successful movie run recently, seems to have far more roads to go down in the near future. Now that Marvel has made The Avengers work so brilliantly, I can’t imagine that DC execs aren’t scrambling to think of a way to make a Justice League movie happen for real. If they are willing to take their time and do it right we could even see a Wonder Woman or Flash movie before it.
DC has not yet successfully tapped into a great percentage of its general audience-friendly arsenal and, if they can do it right, they may be able to prolong the interest in comic book movies a bit longer. One thing we know is that there will be no stopping this comic book movie freight train as long as the publishers keep banking box office hits.
And what does this mean for us, the true fans, as comic book movies get more frequent and colossal? I fear that it’s nothing good. I fear that there are more movies like X-Men: First Class before us that crap all over origins, storylines and continuity for really no reason at all. (Yes, Matthew Vaughn, ever since I heard your First Class quote, “It’s got a lot of teenage angst. The Twilight girls will like it,” you’ve been dead to me, not to mention everything other than Magneto in that movie sucking hard).
It’s definitely possible to make a movie that satisfies comic book loyalists and still entertains the masses, but as the comic book movie genre grows bigger and more profitable, the need to remember the little guy that started it all by going into that comic book shop every Wednesday could easily fall to the wayside. From someone who is, by most standards, level-headed in my love for comics, even I feel a twinge of anger and resentment when I see unnecessary changes to plot lines or characters just to appeal to a wider audience, so what of my extreme brethren?
In the end we may be pushed aside to accommodate these fair weather fans, and when the weather changes once again to a new movie fad, will our publishers come crawling back to us with flowers and apologies? Or can we truly find a way to play nice and share a genre that some people take so personally?