Ok let's just assume what you're saying is true. If general audiences are so burnt out on Batman then why is it that the 6th film has broken all time box office records? Could it be that many ppl actually ended up really enjoying BB and anxiously waited for more when the sequel came out?
I think they were burnt out by the time BB came around. You just said yourself that the diehard fans mostly made up BB's earnings, right? It wasn't soley B&R that determined it's box office, because B&R was almost a decade earlier. Your counting on the fact that the general audience (which makes up most of the audience anyway) is taking all this stuff that seriously & deeply. You actually think everybody that's gonna go see Saw V actually saw all of um? Do you think the quality of the first film of a series is the
sole determing factor of seeing the sequel? Well I have some confessions:
-I loved Bourne Ultimatum, never saw the first, and never watched the second all the way through. Still haven't.
-Never watched a James Bond film in it's entirety until Casino Royale. Not one of them. Scouts honor.
-Loved Godfather I & II, never watched III. ever.
-Loved Aliens, never saw the one before it or any of the others after
Point being, movies that I watch
casually, I just watch when the opportunity presents itself. I'm not gonna lock myself from a movie if I think the previous 500 sucked, I probably wouldn't see them in the first place if I heard they sucked. But if the sequel comes out with rave reviews and its supposed to be great, I'll catch it, and most people on Earth have done the same thing a time or two.
Also, TDK had a whole lot more going for it besides BB. In fact, it's quite possible that alot of people that helped TDK break records never even saw BB. TDK was marketed for well over a year through virals, it was attached to the biggest movie of the holiday season with one of the better trailers in recent memory, then one of its stars died in a way that brought attention to the film from the general audience that might've knew nothing about BB. And let's not forget that there's nothing more epic in comics than Batman vs the Joker, which we hadn't seen on film in almost 20 years, which also broke records the first time in 1989. You don't go from 300 mil worldwide to almost 4x that just because the first movie was "really good." There's alot of factors that make TDK such a high grossing film, not just the quality of BB.
Right......because when you watch a really bad film you end up hating you are automatically open to the idea of watching the sequel. I'm sure this makes perfect sense to some here but it's simply not based in reality.
Your once again assuming that people care that much about all this. We love these characters, but we make up about 5% of the viewing public. The majority of the audience could care less about what happened 5 years ago, maybe if they didn't see the movie they just didn't want to see it, period. Just because we love the character doesn't mean there's something wrong with people who don't, that sounds like its based in reality to me.
B&R was cheesy bad. Hulk 2003 was just plain bad. Ultimately it makes little difference. The point of my argument was to demonstrate that it's very difficult to fight public perception.
It's clear you don't like Ang's movie, which is fine. But I think you should re-watch B&R again before you lump them together. TIH was possible only 5 years later because they saw potential and money still in the franchise. B&R killed that franchise for
almost 10 years, nobody was trying to touch it.
Truly bad movies aren't gonna get sequels or requels or anything only 5 years later, just ask Catwoman
Um, is that why the Spider-man films have made so much money? What about Iron Man? These are all cgi characters. Why didn't audiences have a problem with them in these films? Were they groundbreaking? Hardly. As a matter of fact TIH easily had better cgi than either of those films.

They're not 100% cgi characters, at all. That's Tobey Maguire really in that suit, with his mask off about 99% of the time anyway. That's Downey Jr in a real suit. Not one of those characters is a full 100% creation that has to show emotion and act. And when a scene does call for cgi, it's still based on real-world suits and humans and physics we've seen just seconds before on camera.
The 1st terminator made only about 40 mil. T2 had one of the biggest jumps for a sequel in movie history. Now, the diehard fans wanted to see T2 because of the story from the first one. The other 95% of the audience just wanted to see the liquid Terminator because it looked cool. Now if B&R had such a bad effect on BB's box office, shouldn't T2 have made T3 a whole lot more money? No, because it was years later and the same people who showed a passing interest in watching cool f/x weren't all that concerned anymore, all that was left were the diehard fans, it happens all the time.
The Hulk is a 10 foot green humanoid, expected to look somehow
real? That's alot to ask of, right now, and they did a decent enough job. But for people not absorbed with the character, not knee-deep in his mythology, not childhood comic book readers who follow the makings of these films like we do, there just gonna be meh about it, until it's to the level that progresses f/x work forward for a generation to come, and is a must-see just off that fact alone. That's the type of work this character demands if it's ever going to be a huge box office smash.