The Superhero Movie Bubble

[2kt09]

When it comes right down to it, we have six comic book movies this year. Two from each studio (Marvel, Fox, DC). Is it more than usual? Yes. Will it cause fatigue? I don't think so, as long as at least half of those movies delivers.

Still 7 if you have to take out TMNT because Vince Vaughn in Image's Term Life.

2007 = 7
2008 = 7
2009 = 4
2010 = 7
2011 = 5
2012 = 6
2013 = 8
2014 = 9
2015 = 4~5

arguably the best line-up we've had, but the amount isn't unusual

 

[TheVileOne]

I think it's basically semantics then. So if you technically want to exclude TMNT from the conversation fine with me.

But in 2014, you can still count Cap, X-Men 2, and Guardians as bigger hits for the comic book superhero world plus others that also performed well.

 

[Greens]

Still 7 if you have to take out TMNT because Vince Vaughn in Image's Term Life.

2007 = 7
2008 = 7
2009 = 4
2010 = 7
2011 = 5
2012 = 6
2013 = 8
2014 = 9
2015 = 4~5

arguably the best line-up we've had, but the amount isn't unusual

Fine, the amount of BIG-BUDGET SUPERHERO movies is unusual. That's what I'm talking about. Not movies like Term Life that nobody has ever heard of.

 

[2kt09]

You just narrowed this down to 3-4, still excluding TMNT of course, and, yes, we've handled that amount in previous years.

 

[CyclopsWasRight]

The genre won't implode but I can see people growing tired of so many each year that they becoming more selective on which to see

 

[ernesth100]

I'm calling it. After 2020 the bubble won't pop. But it'll slow down.

 

[Fincher]

When talking about the number of movies being made, I think you also have to take television into account. Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl, Gotham, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter (not technically a superhero show, but it's blatantly tied into the MCU), Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Powers, the upcoming Netflix series, the upcoming X-Men series, the upcoming ordinary people in a superhero world sitcoms...I'm not sure if I'm missing anything.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

I'm calling it. After 2020 the bubble won't pop. But it'll slow down.

I can see this. There will likely always be room for the Big Dogs (Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, etc.) and the smaller scale more adult oriented CBM (Kingsman, Kick-Ass, etc.) will always have their niche. But it will become tougher for newer, lesser known heroes to break into the marketplace. The Ant-Men of the world are going to feel the hit more than the Batmen.

But it won't become a dead genre, by any means. At least not for a long, long time.

 

[TheVileOne]

Even though Kingsman is based on a comic, it's more like a post-modern James Bond spy movie riff.

I'm not sure if the Ant-Man's of the world will suffer because a lot of people were saying Ant-Man would bomb, but it ended up making $180 million and did even better business than the first Captain America. Like it did well enough that Marvel opted to delay Captain Marvel to get a sequel going. And I mean...pushing back Captain Marvel to accommodate Ant-Man is a pretty big deal. Before that, there wasn't much sequel talk for Ant-Man.

 

[Thundercrack85]

I think things will be alright as long as there is quality control. Which there is. I may personally have Marvel fatigue (really more Avengers fatigue, than Marvel), but obviously the general public still has a lot of enthusiasm for these movies.

As long as these movies stay good, have good acting, have good story lines, etc, they should be fine.

The old Superman and Batman franchises didn't fall apart because of market saturation, they fell apart because of the dramatic decrease in quality. A lot of them (e.g. Superman IV, Batman and Robin) were just bad movies.

The only other concern is unnecessary, or too frequent reboots.

 

[Batmannerism]

Just to point out, Hancock actually made a good $40m more than IM world wide.
Also, while IM1 is considered a "big one", I think that is in terms of quality, being a breakout and what it started (MCU), but in terms of money earned there's a good $500m between it and TDK, so I don't think it's a "big one" in that sense.



I think you're failing to look at other factors, such as film quality, marketing quality, production budget, as well as style/sub-genre. I think saying "amount x is sustainable but anything after will fail" is too black and white.

Like Dredd. IIRC, it didn't have good marketing, but also I don't think the GA even knows it's a CBM. They'd associate it with Stallone if anything.
GR2 was terrible, but offered somethin totally different.




Gambit isn't coming out this year. As others have said, TMNT isn't even viewed as a CBM by the public.

The GA also doesn't have to be persuaded to see all these films equally.

BvS & CACW are the 2 biggest hitters there by a large margin, with X:A firmly in 3rd.
Deadpool is relatively low budget ($65m) r-rated flick, if it makes $300m it'll be considered highly successful.
SS is mid-budget (I've seen ~$100m floated around), doesn't need to break the bank to be very successful.




But again, we aren't looking at 6 films all vying for $1bn here, they're various levels.
Wolverine will certainly be mid-budget, like the last one, that'll be aiming at $400m to be a success.
GOTG2 & JL are probably the 2 legit contenders for $1bn.
WW $600m, Thor $700m, Spidey $700-800m. And that's if they're all good movies that are well marketed.

It's actually not that different to this year.

If you look at the Worldwide box office of the last few years the top 20 films range from about $350m up to $1bn, sometimes well over $1bn with multiple films. So there's definitely enough room for these 6-7 films.



Again, you're not considering other factors, like quality. If DS sucks and then flops then no, fatigue hasn't arrived. It's just one instance of a bad movie not doing well.
If it's a great movie and still flops? Still not an indicator of fatigue, just one movie out of 6. The fate of the genre doesn't rest on the shoulders of one film.

And there's another point in favour of the Superhero genre, all 6 movies this year lean into different sub-genres and have a variety of tones. R-Rated action comedy, epic sorcery, grimey villain team-up, etc.
Even the 2 most similar in concept, BvS & CACW, are very different stylistically/tonally.

Same next year. And ultimately I think that's what it comes down to:
-Quality
-Variety (in sub-genre, tone, budget level)
-Good marketing

If the studios generally deliver on those then I think it'll be sustainable for quite a while longer.

This of course is why I ended my first post with the words

Who knows I could be totally wrong, but that's how I see it.

Time will tell.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Even though Kingsman is based on a comic, it's more like a post-modern James Bond spy movie riff.

I'm not sure if the Ant-Man's of the world will suffer because a lot of people were saying Ant-Man would bomb, but it ended up making $180 million and did even better business than the first Captain America. Like it did well enough that Marvel opted to delay Captain Marvel to get a sequel going. And I mean...pushing back Captain Marvel to accommodate Ant-Man is a pretty big deal. Before that, there wasn't much sequel talk for Ant-Man.

Ant-Man didn't come out during a down period for the genre though. Assuming people start to tire of superhero films, whether it be years or decades from now, the lesser known, riskier projects are going to go before the safe, megapopular ones. Ant-Man was successful, but it was a lot riskier for Marvel Studios than say Age of Ultron was. That I personally thought it ended up being a better movie than Age of Ultron doesn't really factor into the equation. It is about how much money a film can make with as little risk possible.

As long as these movies stay good, have good acting, have good story lines, etc, they should be fine.

Maintaining consistent quality is definitely going to be the biggest issue. As long as the movies stay good, people will keep going to them. A bunch of disasters in a short period of time, and they'll stop.

If Deadpool, BvS, Civil War, Apocalypse, Suicide Squad, and Dr. Strange all end up being as bad as Batman & Robin, that would kill the genre pretty quick. Not that I think that is going to happen.

 

[TheVileOne]

Yeah, that ultimately became the issue with the Spider-Man franchise.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Yeah, that ultimately became the issue with the Spider-Man franchise.

Very much so.

 

[metaphysician]

See, my issue with the "super hero fatigue"/"super hero bubble" logic is the way it always has an undercurrent of ". . .and it will destroy all the good movies!" We have zero reason to believe people will stop going to see good quality super hero blockbusters, even if the genre's popularity does go down. What we probably would see happen is people would stop seeing the *mediocre* super hero blockbusters, the ones that don't bring anything notable to the table.

Which is to say, even if the "bubble" bursts, this isn't going to harm everybody equally. Its going to harm the weak and vulnerable. Which is to say, it sucks to be Fox at that point.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Keep in mind that none of this is really new. Certain people have been complaining about blockbusters and the demise of New Hollywood since the late 70s, and are always convinced that this is the year that people are finally going to stop going to these horrible big budget tentpoles and allow 'real art' to be made again.

 

[Mandon Knight]

We are on the cusp and about to enter THE most exciting era of CBM's, the genre, medium, franchise, however one wishes to describe it is exceptionally healthy and will remain so due to a loyal fanbase who get to see their favourite characters on screen.

 

[DrCosmic]

Hmmm...

I'm pretty sure the exact number of movies isn't the determining factor. It's more about avoiding the audience expectation that a Superhero movie will be more of the same or otherwise bad, which is an easy pitfall when there are a lot of them, but not a given for any given number. Rom Coms have waned, I believe, and not because of the number, of because of Katherine Heigl's antics, but simply because they're not as relatable or relevant to the current dating scene as they were in the 90s.

I think the superhero movie bubble doesn't burst until the blockbuster movie system 'busts' and that only comes when they're out of ideas and they no longer become good investments. Superhero movies were starting to feel very same-y for a while, but by making them into movies from different genres it not only took the profile of a movie like Captain America 2 up several notches, but also brought with it the idea that maybe the next one will bring something new to the table too. Right now the trend is dressing up maniacs in superhero trappings and giving them a cool Top 40 song for the trailer so that the superhero aspect is almost incidental to being guys with guns who cause mayhem (GotG, Deadpool, Suicide Squad). So it'll be a while until that gets old and then there's room to reinvigorate it again. I think the whole non-superhero superhero thing that Jumper and Push and the like were trying to do still has time to come around. Superhero comics themselves have a number of twists and wrinkles to keep the audience interested and keep the genre relevant.

The process that you're talking about, with a trope becoming 'dead' is a 40-60 year process. Look how long it took superhero comics to really get to the point where indie/non-superhero books are starting to outshine the likes of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men in terms of critical or commercial appeal. 50 years at least. It may be 2050 before the 'bubble' bursts and a few unsuccessful films we've seen before ten times fall by the wayside for whatever new hotness is coming up. And by that time we'll have 50 years of unheroic properties passed over during Golden, Silver and Bronze age of Superhero Movies, to say nothing remakes of the 'classics' such as Lord of the Rings, the Matrix, and of course Star Wars Episode 12 or whatever.

If 'movies' is even the best way to describe mass media entertainment by that time. It's more likely the theater distribution system will collapse before the superhero movie audience does. The price of popcorn keeps going up and the value they offer versus home theater keeps going down.

 

[metaphysician]

Also, it should be noted that a large part of why the Western faded as a genre had nothing to do with popularity at all. Westerns relied on a large infrastructure of trained personnel: movie cowboys, animal trainers, and other "wild west" performers. This infrastructure actually grew out of the *real* "wild west" ( or rather, the wild west shows of the early 20th century ). Eventually, the people composing it aged and died, and the infrastructure that made westerns cheap to make largely disappeared.

Westerns still get made to this day. However, now they must justified their budget, and their budgets fits the period action/wilderness films they are, rather than being artificially low.

 

[Marvin]

The Western analogy is flawed because comic books (or graphic novels, if you want to be pretentious) are a medium, not a genre.

this argument will gain alot more traction the day we see a straight on rom com with no sign of fisticufs with the bad guys at the end. As it stands they all baseline do similar things in this regard.
Do a comic book horror every year, a war movie..a western etc.
Stuff like sin city and 300 and walking dead help in this regard but formulaic movie structure aside, the medium argument could stand to gain from such things.

 

[Doctor Octopus]

Keep in mind that none of this is really new. Certain people have been complaining about blockbusters and the demise of New Hollywood since the late 70s, and are always convinced that this is the year that people are finally going to stop going to these horrible big budget tentpoles and allow 'real art' to be made again.

I hate when it implied that comic book films cannot be art.