With the underwhelming grosses of the mega-budgeted tentpole film Green Lantern, one of the box-office analysts and prognosticators over at boxofficemojo.com, one of my favorite sites, has raised the question of whether the failure of GL, as well as the most recent X-Men film to set the box-office on fire are evidence of comic-adaptation burnout among moviegoers, particularly American audiences. Now, I may not be an American and I may not live in America, but I happen to enjoy good Hollywood movies in general and good comic-book movies in particular, so I found this topic particularly interesting.
The theory is that because neither Thor nor X-Men: First Class ended up doing Iron Man numbers, and because Green Lantern has apparently failed to launch a bankable DC Comics character film franchise outside of Superman and Batman, studios will no longer be willing to invest large amounts of money in what are considered B-List comic-book characters. The writer then went on to speculate that the respectable if not quite stellar grosses of Thor could be indicative of the kind of business that Marvel's upcoming Captain America film will do.
Now, box-office prognostication is never a 100% exact science, and if people had the perfect formula for launching a new film with new ideas, there probably wouldn't be any need for sequels, so obviously there's no point in taking the article at face value. That said, I do feel a touch of trepidation as far as the box-office fate of Captain America is concerned, even while I feel that the writer is still off-base about comic-book movies in general.
Even though, if the trailers are any indication, Captain America looks like a genuinely well-made film and one which its distributor Paramount Pictures appears to be marketing with reasonable aggressiveness, the tepid reception of the actually very good X-Men prequel along does not bode well for its box-office chances, nor does the fact that it's opening in the wake of arguably the most highly-anticipated movie of the year, the last installment of the Harry Potter series.
To my mind the problem facing Marvel with Cap's movie seems to be one of timing; part of me can't help but wonder why, instead of cramming Cap into a precarious July spot, after audiences have had to digest two Marvel movies and one DC one, they didn't just use Cap to launch next summer's slate and push The Avengers back to Memorial Day? Well, they have their own number-crunchers to figure that out, I guess, but if their current gambit fails I'll bet they'll be wishing they'd thought of moving Cap to next year, or done something more audacious like move him to winter, where he'd be the lone comic-book-based property as opposed to just another face in an already-crowded summer slate.
That said, I hardly think these numbers spell the doom of comic-book movies, even those based on "b-listers."
Sure, Thor didn't post Iron Man numbers, but what the writer didn't mention in his article (and which I'm sure he was aware of) was that in 2008, Iron Man was an overachiever, powered mainly by a career-resurrecting performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who, it is worth mentioning here, had, prior to that film NEVER anchored a film that grossed over $100 million in the United States, let alone a bona-fide, half-a-billion-dollar-worldwide-grossing blockbuster. Even the most optimistic estimates for that film seemed to peg its U.S. gross at $250 million. Considering that the first Iron Man beat out every other movie but The Dark Knight at the US box-office that year, it seemed to make a rock-solid case for adapting not-so-well-known comic-book characters for the big screen.
What makes Thor such a poor barometer for the blockbuster potential of films like Captain America and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man movies is the fact that Thor was always going to be extremely hard to pull off and even harder to sell, and the fact that Marvel, Kenneth Branagh and their cast and crew managed to do both is something for which they deserve medals all around. But it should always be remembered that the odds of Thor becoming a hit were always kind of remote. It could have just as easily suffered the same fate as Ang Lee's Hulk. It's easy for people to say "I knew it would be a hit all along" now, but deep down I'm sure people know better. In industry where there's still no such thing as a 100% sure thing, this movie was about the farthest thing from a sure thing that a Marvel movie could get, ergo its inability to crack the magical $200 million mark in the U.S. simply cannot be viewed as a weakness of the genre in general. It's kind of a funny way to say that Thor should be viewed as an unqualified success, but there it is.
I will not debate, on the other hand, that X-men: First Class is a definite underachiever, one which looks set to finish even below the least well-received of all the X-men movies, the risible Wolverine prequel at the box-office, but as a lot of people have acknowledged, that film was definitely going to be hurt by the absence of Wolverine from the team's roster, especially considering that all four of the previous films were basically centered around him. Still, considering it was a fantastic film, arguably as good as if not better than the best in the series, which got a lot of love from critics, I am genuinely disappointed that it hasn't been doing better at the box-office, although I think it has, if nothing else, established that the franchise can stand on its own two feet without Wolverine, even though its first couple of steps free of the Canucklehead's support have been wobbly ones. I honestly think, if they maintain this standard of quality, that the sequel to this prequel or reboot or whatever it is, will almost certainly outgross X-men: First Class.
If there's anything that can truly hurt Captain America: The First Avenger and other non-Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/Iron Man comic book flicks it will definitely be Green Lantern's poor reception by critics and audiences alike. Again, like I said before (in my review), the real tragedy of that film was that it should have worked as it had most of the crucial ingredients in place (except, unfortunately, a decent script). I don't know why Warner Brothers wasn't able to make it work, so there's not much more I can say on the subject.
What I can say, though is that the lesson to learn from this is a pretty simple one, one I would think movie execs should be capable of remembering: too much of anything is bad. In 2006 there were something like a dozen or so animated films that came out, with a lot of them falling by the wayside, and in subsequent years the glut was corrected and fewer such movies came out; the same will be true for movies released in 3-D, which is the current craze: a lot of 3-D movies will bomb and so fewer of them will be made. Box-office duds like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Losers and Priest can pretty much guarantee that studio heads will be more discriminating about which comic-book property they adapt, especially if Cowboys and Aliens tanks too. People will learn that just because it's a comic-book property doesn't mean it'll make money. The movie has to be a good one, too, and it has to be sold well.
Good adaptations of good comic books can do plenty of box-office business when given room to breathe, something that's not happening this year, and which, with The Avengers, and new Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Ghost Rider films on the way, is not going to happen next year, either.
Pixar does only one film a year, maybe Marvel, now Pixar's stablemate at Disney, can think of doing the same once they've finally put The Avengers into theaters. Or maybe Disney/Marvel, Warner Brothers/DC and everyone else with future ambitions of adapting comic books into movies can actually sit down or conference call each other and figure out a way to give each other room so that their movies don't end up cannibalizing each other at the box-office or collectively wearing down audience interest. There's a thought; release comic-book movies few and far between to keep people lean and anxious to see new movies every time, like Pixar does.
Too bad it'll probably take Captain America flopping at the box-office to get studio execs to think like that.
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