With all the comic strip movies on the weight made in the past two decades, it is easy to forget how they have ranked in the cultural food chain half a century ago. Taking this opinion of space, the twin arrival of “Superman” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” tightens an era in which the superheroes climbed in unprecedented height and, according to the way this month pivot takes place, the risk of falling towards the ground.
Understanding the current state of the superhero film in fact requires revisiting this story, because things happened so quickly-has it only 17 years that “Iron Man” was created? Or 39 years that “Howard the Duck” almost killed all the kind? – You must almost slow it down, as if they use the idle in “The Flash”, to obtain a clear image of the events.
The last two decades have experienced vertiginous trade, but more recently disturbing stockings. It is the backdrop in the approach of a large crossroads, the industry hoping that new sockets on the signature franchises of DC and Marvel, “Superman” and “Fantastic Four”, can save the day.
Having resisted the respective setbacks, the fate of comics films could be largely determined by what is happening while these traditional rivals, DC of Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney’s Marvel, find themselves in reconstruction mode, requiring blows to inaugurate their next chapters. Without them, the future for such adaptations seems more uncertain than it has done for some time, at least in this universe.
DC hopes to revive his “cinematographic universe” with “Superman”, James Gunn’s attempt to recharge the emblematic hero, while Marvel put on a big boost of “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”, a third version of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961, which made its doors in the era of the comic strips of Marvel, followed by X-Men, The Hulk, The Avengers, Torl, Anse, Spider-Man ,,, Hulk creative explosion that some compared to another duo of the 60s, John Lennon des Beatles and Paul McCartney.
If there seems to be a common bond between the two films, this implies embracing a feeling of pleasure and playfulness – elements found in “Superman”, and obvious in the trailer “First Steps” and its nostalgic backdrop of the 60s – after the most brooded tone in certain recent comic strips. There is also an obvious affection for the fundamental roles of these two comics for their respective companies, the question being whether this and the more sunny perspectives (certainly compared to the “Fantastic Four” or “Man of Steel” of 2015) will widen their appeal, as opposed to the first crowd online.
After a series of threads of billions of dollars, Marvel’s latest releases, “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Thunderbolts *”, reported less than $ 800 million worldwide. As for DC, he has been waiting for Kal-el since “The Flash”, “Blue Beetle” and the “Aquaman” suite all fell below expectations in 2023.
To supervise where things were standing in front of the original “Superman”, 1975 saw the release of “Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze”, a fairly brilliant film based on the hero Pulp which actually preceded the introduction of Superman’s superman’s comic strip of a few years. With hindsight, with a budget that Ben Mankiewicz of TCM has described as “dozens of dollars”, he underlined how much the material based on the comic strip to slightly considered was before Christopher Reeve took off in 1978, followed by many crises and at the start until the reign of Marvel begins officially 30 years later.
Michael Uslan, the producer of the films “Batman” with Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton, recalled his fight to present the film when he acquired the rights in 1979, starting an odyssey of a decade to bring a darker version of the character to the screen.
“The people I launched were an older generation, were the generation that is not like me who grew up with the birth of Marvel and the evolution of DC and all the other companies and superhero that emerged,” Uslan told Thewrap. “They were always part of this old generation which had comics in their memory are bad for you, or at best, comics are cheap entertainment for small children.”
The Fantastic Four occupy a special place for lovers of comics, given their role in the redefinition of the industry. Lee, famous, had considered giving up the writing of comics before playing on something more ambitious with “Fantastic Four”, proceeding to revitalize Marvel with Kirby and the artist Spider-Man Steve Ditko.
Unlike Kirby, who died in 1994, Lee lived to see these creations conquer pop culture and become industry ambassador. He has often talked about improvements in visual effects like the key – “The special effects allow us to tell these stories as they should be,” he said in a 2014 interview – but the secret ingredient was really filmmakers with comics who loved them and took the material seriously in the 1960s, “70 and” 80.
“I want this to happen overnight,” said Lee, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, when “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was created in 2015. “I am not a patient – I want all this to happen 30, 40, 50, but I’m glad it happened. I am happy that I am still there while it happens, because it is incredibly pleasant.”
For DC, Superman and Batman settled the bar
For DC, on the other hand, all the roads invariably lead to Superman and Batman.
Director’s “Superman” Richard Donne made his slogan “You will believe that a man can fly” and helped draw a path to a more ambitious and better quality superhero rate. After a trio of consequences, which gives decreasing yields, the Baton went to his companion DC Comics “Batman”, with the 1989 film of Burton marking an austere and welcome departure of the television program of the 60s which became a huge success.
Thanks to his tumultuous and economic years on the economic level, Marvel Comics has in fact sold cinematographic rights to some of his most prominent characters, which explains why the next important step of the superhero film, “X-Men”, fell under the aegis of 20th Century Fox in 2000, which then also controlled the rights of fantastic oven.
“Spider-Man”, another Marvelle Marvel who landed in Sony, exploded on the stage two years later with the first opening weekend of more than $ 100 million, and Warner Bros. Launched the Dark Knight trilogy with director Christopher Nolan starting with “Batman Begins” in 2005, followed by the success of the Oscar with press.
Marvel’s game on a “cinematic universe”
Marvel really started its domination, improbably, by embarking on a daring scheme to publish a handful of nested films starting with “Iron Man” in 2008, and culminating with “The Avengers” in 2012.
As the chief of Marvel noted, Kevin Feige, this plan – initiated before Disney was acquired the company for $ 4 billion in 2009 – represented a huge bet given that the humble history of Marvel and the dependence on characters with less widespread familiarity than Superman and Batman.
“People forget that” Iron Man “was an independent film,” said Feige in the book “McU: The Reign of Marvel Studios”. “I presented this film tens of times to foreign buyers because we had to obtain – I do not remember exactly the percentage, but a large percentage of funding that he came from the pre -selection of foreign rights.”
The Midas Touch of Marvel continued even with second-level characters like “Ant-Man”, “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Captain Marvel”, before culminating (then some) with the “Avengers: endgame” climate in 2019, which reported almost 2.8 billion dollars in the world.
Since then, however, Marvel has sparked ostentatious failures, not entirely his fault (covid withdrawal blockbusters in general, and films like “Eternals” in particular), but undergoing his sure reputation. Add DC’s difficulties since the consecutive winners “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman” in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and the opponents wonder if the pre-eminence window at the superhero box office, or at least.
Of course, “Deadpool & Wolverine” became a huge success last summer. At the time, Feige celebrated the rejection of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four with the Marvel portfolio and the possibilities that opened, noting that there were “giant sections of our classic comics which were X-Men that we could not translate into the MCU. Now we can. “
Obviously, in terms of investment and expectations, the superheroes were very long, with the last “Superman” enthusiastically embracing DC characters even relatively obscure, giving life to the comics in a way that could have appeared unimaginable.
After all, in addition to cheap films like “Doc Savage”, the 1970s featured Threadbar television shows like “Wonder Woman”, “Spider-Man” and “The Incredible Hulk”, the latest counting on 6’5 “Bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno, camera angles and walls of tear to create its limited special effects.
“Fantastic Four”, on the other hand, became a cartoon on Saturday morning which replaced the human torch (including the rights to the screen, like X-Men, were attached) by a Wisecracking robot. In 1994, an independent low -budget version of the producer of producer Roger Corman was produced, but never officially published.
Committee fans who see these years like the bad old days can push sighs of relief that they do not come back. However, recent hiccups have introduced a level of uncertainty that the genre has not known since Downey Jr. put on this armored costume. Although Marvel has sometimes made the floor easy, all the indicators suggest that it will take more than just to reach another “end of game”.
