Slashdot Mirror
What's Next For Superhero Movies?
New submitter Faizdog writes "The Atlantic has a very interesting article on what's next for superhero movies after The Dark Knight Rises leaves theaters. DC in particular doesn't seem to have a good pipeline of readily available heroes to create movies around. The article discusses the challenges surrounding the upcoming Man of Steel movie, as well as how the circumstances around the successful Spiderman reboot may not necessarily translate to a Batman reboot. The author also mentions the necessity and viability of the comic book print medium continuing on in light of the film successes, especially in terms of revenue (the Avengers movie alone made more profit for Marvel than all comic book sales for the last two years). The article concludes with an interesting suggestion that television may be the ideal medium for comic book adaptations, as it may permit a richer and more complex story telling experience than a two-hour movie."
or has that been done before?
I think Drew Carey would be excellent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Cinematic_Universe
And I'm not even a comic fan. Who was this article written for?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Interesting that the article suggests movies possibly superseding the original comics, but doesn't even mention TV series based around these characters, despite the popular and critical success of many such series. Batman: The Animated Series almost single-handedly pulled animation out of its 1980s kiddie ghetto.
Pixar's The Incredibles was everything I could have possibly wanted from a super hero movie. How about a sequel to that?
Young Justice and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes have both been excellent examples of comics on television and show how you can have longer-running plot arcs without the difficulty of extending series past 3 movies. You can also have the comic book trope of a villain being beaten and coming back next season that you never get a chance to do with movies.
Ohhoho, hoho, no.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-actual-live-action-akira-script-worse-than-you-think/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Disney's already working on the John Carter sequel - CowboyNeal of Uranus
Wasn't he already in a Spider-Man movie? *ducks*
Neil Gaiman talked about it at one of his readings.
Hollywood so far as not been able to wrap its head around the concept of a single character who delivers good dreams AND nightmares.
So the scripts he sees keep having a "bad" Sandman character in addition to Morpheus. The "bad" Sandman only delivers nightmares.
Fuck Hollywood is stupid.
I'm in favor of the idea of an ongoing TV series. Heavy super-powers may drain budgets, but I think something like Batman could be done in a way that would make an excellent TV series, especially if it could get a budget approaching what Game of Thrones has. Ultimately, these characters and storylines were developed for an episodic medium, and I think you could get even better results putting them into another episodic medium rather than making a couple of big movies.
Of course, budget is only have the problem. You also need talented writers who can deal with the cultural relevance of some of these characters. I think getting good writers might be the most difficult part. I would be fine with some more high-quality animated work if they could get good writers.
Well, "comic books" have come a long way, and in cases like the original Dark Knight, it's termed more of a graphic novel.
Quite frankly, if Hollywood had a better story telling experience, they wouldn't be turning to heavily to these sources.
Some of these have story lines that go back decades, and which cover a lot more interesting things than what most screen writers seem to be able to do on their own.
Let's face it, starting with the first X-Men movie, these have been making huge amounts of money for the studios.
I would agree that a TV adaptation isn't as likely to garner the audience it would need. But to say that the original comics don't have rich and complex story telling is a little unfair.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have this vague distant memory of when comics were celebrated for bursting with imagination and exploring all sorts of important social issues (racism, sexism, various other isms). With complex twisting plots
While movies, by their nature, can't get that intricate, studios seem to think that people want nothing more than brainless Bay-esque explosion festivals. Then once in a while they accidentally spit out something like Avengers (Can't comment on batman since I haven't seen it yet) where they have something resembling a plot and depth of characters. Yet can't bring themselves to accept that people are tired of the same old Hollywood cliches and want something genuinely new and interesting. Something that tugs on your emotions and somehow pulls you in so deeply that you actually care about the characters as if they were actual living beings.
Here's a hint hollywood... I saw Avengers SOLELY because it was written and directed by Joss Whedon. It is the first movie I have seen in theatre in years, and it's the first movie I have EVER seen where I can honestly say that I would happily fork over money to watch it in theatre again. Why? Because despite Avengers being another comic regurgitation, he still managed to do the above.
Can we have that back again? Please?
If there was ever an example of how racially tonedeaf Hollywood can be it's American Akira.
I guess someone wants us to forget Indiana Jones 4.
Is Hollyweird out of old movies t hey can rehash and turn a profit on?
Will they have to get their creative juices flowing even though that's been long gone in the past two decades?
Don't temp them to mine the 1960s and 1970s TV shows for more "inspiration".
The Super Hero genre has got very, very old for me. I'm not interested in seeing any more, reboot or otherwise. I once spent about half my disposable (after rent, food, and expenses) income on movies, but find Hollywoods desire to hedge on known quantities (sequels, copy-what's-popular, rehash/remake) is killing the creative content. Scads of great books would make for some awesome movies, I certainly have at least one in mind, but Hollywood is practically run by bean-counters and Wall Street now.
It takes someone with finances or clout (like Spielberg) to do something they want to (and alas, Spielberg's War of the Worlds fell far short of what it could have been) so I don't hold out much hope. Now if I want to see a good flick I spend more of my movie & popcorn money on indie and foreign cinema, some people are still creating and I should reward them with my dollar votes rather than the garbage recyclers Hollywood have become.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's impossible to make a good movie from a video game.
The studios aren't interested in good; they're interested in how many people will pay to see it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
XKCD the movie. You know you want it.
The dark, edgy reboot as Gilligan and the Skipper land on the "Lost" island. A threeeee hour tour. A threee hour tour.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I want an Atom movie. And Flash.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I would love to see TV properly exploited as a medium to explore superheroes, other comic book lore, and similar storytelling. Unfortunately, with the exception of Heroes and Buffy, the TV networks have largely been unwilling to put the money and risk into giving any comic book styled work the necessary support.
Good, long term plot based writing only appeals to the networks when they have a LOT of extra capital to throw around with development. One only needs to look to Joss Whedon's other works such as Dollhouse and Firefly to see plot lines and characters bearing strong parallels to the comic book format to see what I am talking about.
The networks are pretty much a lost cause at this point. It seems TNT, USA, Showtime, and HBO are the only ones willing to incubate a variety of shows in which plot arcs matter as much as the stand alone episode. NBC gets the closest to an honorable mention since they were willing to back Heroes and The West Wing years ago (different genre, but Sorkin's storytelling is very similar to comics / graphic novels in every TV show he touches).
Even SyFy (what a terrible restyling) is dropping it's cache of long development series, Eureka and Warehouse 13 in favor of yet more illiterate programming.