But studios already knew that going all the way back to Superman(1978). And it's not as if B&R ushered in some lengthy period of dormancy for comic book properties on screen. Blade came out the very next year and X-Men a scant 2 years later than that. Since 1978 there has never been a period of more than 4 years in a row w/o a comic book movie and that only happened once between Superman3(1983) and Superman4(1987)and now that I think about it, the Supergirl movie was in 1984 so there really hasn't been more than a 3 year span w/o a CB movie. The watershed that happened with Blade & X-Men was that Marvel properties began to get noticed for their potential as much as the older DC ones had been. Peter David said it best when he said that prior to Blade, there had never, ever been an even decent adaption of a Marvel property to film. Hell, even Dark Horse & Image had ones before Marvel did. Marvel had fallen way, way, way behind the curve in that dept. But they sure caught up in a hurry.
No, I disagree. B&R was monumental, it really did make the industry embaressed of the superhero movie.
There could have easily been a longer period of hesitancy to put up the big bucks for this type of movie if X-Men had not done well.
In fact, this is part of the reason X-Men was not expected to do well, and had it's budget slashed while filming.
The Batman franchise had been the one to put the superhero movie back on the map after the Reeve superman's went awry. During the 90s, in the wake of B89's success, many superhero movies came and went, most failing, but the Batmans did well, until B&R. That was the big name, and it's rep being tarnished, and being the one in the public eye, put the rest at risk.
The movie mags at the time of X-Men's release were writing about this. It was a feeling in the industry at the time, that the superhero movie had run it's course and become a parody of itself.
What they didn't think of was to be faithful to the books and take it seriously.
The Reeve SM movies didn't even do that to the extent X-Men did, they were full of cheeseball villans and moments, even the first two. SMTM is totally serious, and then Otis shows up.
Same with the early Batmans, serious, but then they always had something daft happen that you could get away with, and not have to explain, because 'it was a cb movie', something that would not be tolerated in a normal serious drama.
X-Men kicked off today's approach of taking them seriously, and how taking them seriously would make you more money, absolutely.
edit: I'm not really including Blade in this as it's success could be put down to it not being a superhero movie, and being more of a horror film. I'm not saying that necesarily myself, but a studio exec could, put it's success down to the fact there were no traditional superhero elements in it, capes, secret Id etc. so, it's success didn't have anywhere as much impact as X-Mens on where the current climate is.
Yea.
