Much like the Peak Oil analogy, the concept where all the easy oil-wells (cue The Beverly Hillbillies theme, or wailing Middle Eastern aria) have been tapped and exploited and now we either have to drill way off into the ocean, or remove copious amounts of sulphur to get good, usable hydrocarbons or by brute processing force, extract it from the sticky tar sands. Thus several treatments of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the popular mutants of the X-Men have yielded their massive cash bounties, nowhere more greater than the summer of 2012 where The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises reaping box-office windfall (albeit at very high production and marketing costs).
The origin story has been done to death (albeit, The Amazing Spiderman trotted it out once again.) And with it (hopefully) passing, it invites more complex things like the tableaux of societal anxiety in the Nolan Batmans, flirtations with classical tragedy in Ang Lee’s Hulk, period-pieces like Fist Class and Captain America, the universe-slash-continuity building with Marvel Studios across many different characters or even the risky The Last Temptation Christ experiment in Superman Returns.
My question to you is this, with smaller comic book properties such as Ant Man in production, but really, just a slew of sequels and spin offs (Ironman, Thor, Wolverine, Robin) or team ups (Avengers 2, Justice League, Guardians Of The Galaxy) or the eventual reboot of Batman, do you think we’ve hit the peak of Box-Office, at this point, and that the slide (slow or fast) down the curve (with ever increasing budgets to make these things) will convince the major Hollywood Studios to start looking for another trend to get on board with for their big summer tentpoles? Or do you think that things are here to stay, and a more experimental, extracting black gold from the tar sands approach will yield the continuation of a golden age of Comic Book Superhero Films?
A primer of both the optimistic and not so optimistic views from last year, The Great Comic Book Movie Debate:
I had absolutely no intention of buying this book. I didn’t know the character, and I had little interest in finding out about a superhero version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (my uninformed mental image of what this must be). But everybody, and I mean pretty much everybody I know who reads comics told me I had to check it out. And they were right. This is probably one of the best written books of the ones I read; it has a lot of voiceover text boxes, which I don’t always like, but in this case, the monologue is thoughtful and almost poetic – an inner voice that made me want to know about this man. The art is more than solid, too, with the introduction of the big bad done almost wordlessly in one of the most disturbing reveals of this subset of #1s. I will definitely be back for more.
I’ll confess, Superman has always been one of my least favorites of the major superheroes. I just find him kind of boring, with his eager do-gooder attitude and his essentially unbeatable powers. But this Superman isn’t boring – he starts off tearing up an office building and holding a crooked company owner over the balcony, threatening to drop him if he doesn’t answer for his mistreatment of the people of Metropolis. This Superman is young, volatile, unpredictable, and dangerous. You understand why the police want to catch him. I love that. I even love the jeans-and-Superman-t-shirt costume he’s wearing. Yeah, I’m in.
