Forget Gotham City and Metropolis – superheroes prefer Hollywood.
Why not? Anyone in a cape and tights commands enormous respect there. And the money? Well, it's super.
In the past three years, five comics-inspired superhero movies (X2, the Spider-Man movies, Hulk and Men in Black 2) combined for $2.5 billion in ticket sales. The two Spider-Man movies alone earned $1.5 billion at the box office – more than the gross domestic product of 54 of the world's 231 countries.
Add in ancillary profits – TV, video, merchandise – and Spidey's probably worth as much as a small European country.
Less-heroic comic-book characters also have grown popular with filmmakers and critics. Recent adaptations of graphic novels by Dan Clowes (Ghost World), Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner (Road to Perdition), and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) received Oscar nominations.
According to Marvel Comics publisher Dan Buckley, the increasing popularity of comics-inspired movies has helped lift the comics industry out of what he called the "nightmare" of the mid- and late-1990s. After a speculative boom in the early '90s, when collectors got crazy with their checkbooks, comic-book sales plummeted, leaving the medium in dire straits.
"This is the healthiest I've seen the comics industry," said Buckley, who sees spikes in his book business each time a Marvel-inspired movie is released. He estimated that sales of Marvel's books have doubled in the past four or five years.
The comics industry as a whole, Buckley added, is increasingly stable for several reasons: diversified products (including video games and merchandise), a broader range of content (manga and graphic novels are more and more popular) and an audience that's expanding beyond cultists. And, of course, comics benefit enormously from the global spotlight Hollywood provides.
"I never envisioned Marvel becoming the entertainment powerhouse it has become in the last four or five years," said Rob Worley, who created Comics2Film, a clearinghouse of articles and information, in 1997.
"Back then, comic-book movies were such a ghetto topic," he said. "There weren't many movies, and most were terrible."
Worley said the release of Blade in 1998 and X-Men in 2000 helped turn people's heads (other films from the late '90s – Batman and Robin, Steel, Spawn – failed to varying degrees). The enormous success of 2002's Spider-Man – the sixth-highest-grossing film in history – made superheroes as hip as they've ever been.
Comics-inspired movies have a long history. In the 1940s, Saturday serials featured Captain Marvel, The Phantom, Batman, Superman and Captain America. Several characters made the jump to TV, including in Saturday-morning cartoons.
Unfortunately, all of the early superhero movies, along with TV series like Batman, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, suffered from their spoofy attitudes. Working in conjunction with cheapo special effects, irony seemed appropriate – how seriously can you take a Batman whose fight scenes are obscured by title cards reading "BLAM!!!!!"?
But the goofy superhero days are done. Hollywood's FX wizards are able to invest superheroic exploits with a veneer of reality.
"Spider-Man can move as fast and quirky as anything we've seen on screen," Worley said. "And they can make a Hulk that really looks like the Hulk, and not just a bodybuilder."
Kevin Feige, a vice president at Marvel Studios who served as executive producer on Spider-Man 2 and Hulk, remembers meeting with an FX producer to discuss the upcoming Fantastic Four.
"We were talking about doing a certain kind of effect, and we asked him, 'Can you do that?'" Feige said. "He looked at me and said, 'We can do anything.'
"Really, they can do anything."
Typical 21st-century superheroes live in cinematic worlds that feel more real. And, according to Feige, the characters seem to increasingly struggle with real-world problems.
"Our films are about how you might react if you had superpowers," he said. "The films can be, like in Spider-Man, about adolescence, responsibility, growing up. Or they can be about prejudice, about being persecuted and cast out, like in X-Men.
"The fact that there are claws and webs and superpowers is what makes them popcorn movies."
Feige credits these psychological elements for part of the success of the new crop of superhero films. And Peter Rainer, president of the National Society of Film Critics and a contributing editor to New York Magazine, thinks the increasing complexity and ambiguity of the typical superhero reveals something about the state of our culture.
"Traditional superheroes from the golden age of comics were true-blue righters of wrongs," he said. "But this has changed – we seem to want our superheroes to be flawed and more human-scaled now, a la Spider-Man.
"National self-image plays into this – since both Vietnam and Iraq are divisive and relatively unpopular, it makes it difficult to create real-world American heroes in the traditional mode. So enter (these new) superheroes, flawed though they be. It's escapism with a touch of real-world darkness blended into the mix."
Feige, who is working on Marvel films for 2006 and beyond, expects the rise of comics-inspired movies to continue. With a new generation of comic-obsessive directors, writers and studio execs having come into power, he expects the genre to expand in new directions.
Certainly, superheroes and comics-inspired movies will reign in 2005 and 2006. Next year's slate includes Sin City (directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller), Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (which could mark DC Comics' return to the top) and Fantastic Four, along with a half-dozen other adaptations.
Films in the pipeline for 2006 and 2007 include X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3 and Superman Returns.
There's another reason to think that comics-inspired movies will become a more permanent feature of American cinema. Feige said that Marvel has identified 4,700 characters, 99 percent of which have yet to jump to the big screen.
