Marvel Movie Overload?

A few posts ago I wrote about how Disney, Marvel Entertainment's corporate parent, was taking the backseat in producing Marvel movies in 2014 and leaving the spotlight to the two remaining studios that still own the rights to making movies, namely Sony/Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which will be releasing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, respectively. In a way, that's still true as Marvel is vacating their prime summer real-estate, namely the very first weekend of May, which they have occupied without interruption since 2010 and giving the spot to Sony for the release of TASM 2, but whatever they're giving up in terms of timing, they're certainly making up for in quantity of releases.

All told, this year there will be five movies based on Marvel Comic book characters which is the most that have ever been released in a single year: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Big Hero 6. Of those five, three will be sequels, and of those three, two will be sequels to franchises over ten years old. Trailers for three of them have already come out, and the marketing push in general has been pretty strong. The Captain America movie, on top of teaser trailers, has also started a multimedia push as covers for upcoming issues renowned British movie magazine Empire will sport characters from the movie in full costume. Spider-Man made an appearance at the New Year countdown a few days ago, on top of all the other marketing gimmicks Sony has been pushing on the internet, including a full trailer. It's not unreasonable to expect similar promotional stunts for the other movies. 

The inevitable question for me is: are we finally starting to get too much Marvel? As a Marvel geek I'm still game, especially since the trailers that have come out so far look great, but for non-comic book fans, five comic book movies in one year seems like a heck of a lot. How many Marvel movies can the average moviegoer take in one year?  Last year was a banner year for Marvel-based movies, with Iron Man 3 grossing $1.2 billion, Thor: The Dark World grossing over $600 million and The Wolverine grossing over $400 million at the global box office, dispelling notions of comic-book movie fatigue, but this year there will be five of them, and 2014 could easily end up like 2011, when not a single comic-book based movie managed to crack the half billion mark at the global box office. Of course, that's not likely to happen to the Spidey or X sequels, but the potential casualties here could be the two new properties, Guardians of the Galaxy and Big Hero 6, which will come out after the three sequels have given audiences their fill of A-list Marvel heroes. GOTG and BH6, in contrast to the other three movies, apart from being non-sequels, are based on considerably less popular Marvel Comics and still bear the burden of "proving themselves" to audiences.

Personally, the movie I most want to see of the five (and I want to see them all) is Big Hero 6, so the thought that, being the last of the five movies to come out, it could end up on the short end of the box-office stick saddens me a little bit. It excites me because it's the one thing that's never been done before. GOTG could be accused of being "Star Trek/Star Wars lite" but the anime-inspired BH6, which will be the first Marvel animated feature film, has the potential to be so much more than that. As a fan of Pixar's The Incredibles, I have, since Disney purchased Marvel in 2010, been anxious to see Disney's resources and talent to animate a Marvel property (and the Phineas and Ferb episode doesn't count), and while I would have preferred to see a more familiar property, like Doctor Strange or Runaways, adapted,  this will do just fine for a start. The film isn't being produced by Disney's Pixar unit, but after the remarkable quality of last year's Wreck-It-Ralph I know Disney can do action comedy every bit as well as they can do musical princess-themed movies.

However mainstream audiences respond to these films, one things for sure; this year Marvel movie geeks will DEFINITELY get their Marvel fix several times over!