Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Have Blockbuster Movies Been Good to Comic Books?


It looked like another good year for the marriage—movie franchises based on comic book superheroes raked in billions of dollars more for Hollywood. Celluloid success, however, hasn’t rescued the comics industry from its death throes. What will?

From a piece in Hazlitt...

But diehard comics fans, who are vital to the art form’s survival and pick up new issues of their favourite series every Wednesday, often have a vexed relationship with the films. Jordan and his friends have a theory: at every movie studio, “There’s this guy who’s a big comic book fan, and once they’re ready to start filming, they ask him: ‘Can you throw something into this movie that’s really going to piss off regular comic book readers?’ ‘Oh, OK—sure. Instead of web shooters, let’s have the webs come out of Spiderman’s hands.’ For comic readers, this is an excruciating detail. It’s an agonizing affront.”

He has a litany of examples: the fact that Deadpool, known as “The Merc with the Mouth” in comics, doesn’t talk in X-Men Origins: Wolverine; the transformation of Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer from a planet-eating giant to a cloud; the significant shrinking of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises …

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