
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:





(4/5)
For my third movie I chose to watch Sam Raimi’s



In the depths of Hong Kong, where cramped quarters are a given and American Government control seems slightly thwarted, reside a number of individuals who are running from a government organization simply referred to as “Division”. You see, these folks have super powers and they’re hiding to avoid being recruited into the folds of the secret agency and being turned into guinea pigs. With the help of a few other specially powered folks, Nick (a “Mover”) and Cassie (a “Watcher”) try to find a woman (a “Pusher”), the only individual ever to have escaped from the grasps of Division, and a drug she’s carrying; a drug that will somehow lead to salvation.










