‘Superman & Batman’ movie will follow ‘Man of Steel’

And Shatner's Kirk.

 

They do in the comics. Very much so. And they have done so in animation, too. This will be the first time they're on screen together in a live action movie.

 

MOS was one of the biggest cinematic successes of last year. There may have been some criticism of the level of destruction, but the general audience has not given the film the same type of analyses that we have given it on boards like these. Superman is still a hero, and the idea behind the film was that he was an ordinary guy on the inside that stood up for what was right, which was the point of the montage.

 

I don't know about that. This is all anecdotal, but I know quite a few non-geeky types in real life who disliked Man of Steel. In fact, the only person I know who liked the film is a hardcore comic book geek.

 

I saw it with my non comic book geek sister and she liked it too. A lot of the negative comments I've seen around the internet comes from the hard core comic geeks.

 

The metrics that measure audience response are broad and not fully satisfying, but they beat anecdotal evidence by a long shot, and they indicate that the general audience mostly liked Man of Steel, certainly more than critics did.

 

And what metrics would those be?

 

Ticket sales, perhaps? Although not the hit wanted by the studio, several end of year articles listed MoS as being the financial highlight of the film season.

 

A Cinemascore (which is an exit poll of opening weekend audiences) of A-.

An IMDB user score of 7.4 from over 350,000 users.

A Rotten Tomatoes user score of 76% from over 400,000 users.

None of those are fully satisfactory measures, but they're the best we have and better than mere anecdotes. The user ratings are self-selecting, but at least they have a very large number of participants and are therefore a better measure than the far smaller self-selected hodgepodge of fandom message board posts.

 

For films that people think are suxor, word of mouth tends to spread pretty fast, and they tend to bomb at the box office. Large ticket sales are, with very high probability, not for films with mostly dissatisfied audiences.

 

Yeah I think it's a stretch to say audiences were "divided" over the film. Obviously the critics and hardcore fans were divided, but the general audience probably either liked it or thought it was just a decently entertaining summer action flick.

Unlike us, most people just don't have the time or energy to get all worked up about a superhero movie, or obsess over every detail like we do. And as you can see from the Cinemascores every week, they generally tend to like a movie more than the critics and fanboys do anyway.

 

Yea, approx 75% for IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes General Audiences, isn't the most glowing of reviews, but, it's still 3 out of 4, and add the CinemaScore A- Exit Polling, plus, the $600M+ Box office take, and it looks pretty successful/appreciated to me

 

$600M+

 

Ooops... Yea, thanks for the correction

 

For the vast majority of film viewers, the ONLY criterion that is of any importance is: Did this movie entertain me? If the answer is YES, then, for them, it's a good movie. It's really just that simple. So, movies that "divide the critics/fans", like Abrams' Trek films, or MoS or (fill in the blank with your personal pet peeve that still sold oodles of tickets) are generally not divisive among the general population. They are either good (I was entertained), bad (boring is usually the worst problem there, or unfunny if a comedy) or meh (it was ok). And box office usually reflects those three categories.

Film critics, film students and fans of a franchise, director, genre--they don't necessarily fit one of those three broad categories--but they also rarely represent anything but a small fraction of the general audience. And the studio cares A LOT more about the general audience than any of the subsets listed in the previous sentence.

 

LOL $600,000 total would basically cripple any Superman movies for the forseeable future

 

It would need to be an extremely limited release to make this little money, though. Like, 8 theaters total.

 

This could be Batman from the new film

 

In fact, Superman and Batman first crossed over on the Superman radio series in 1945, years before they first crossed over in the comics. The radio show often brought in Batman as a guest hero when Superman's portrayer Bud Collyer was on vacation.

Superman and Batman have been part of the DC Universe in the comics for as long as it's existed as a continuous universe. Of course they were founding members of the Justice League of America in the early '60s and have usually been part of its roster ever since. They also appeared as core JLA members in Super Friends throughout the '70s and early '80s, and in multiple different Justice League animated series and movies from the '90s through the present.

Of course, the different adaptations in which superheroes appear are all different "universes" retelling the story in different ways, so yes, there have presumably been filmic universes in which one hero existed but the other didn't. It's a safe bet that the version of Batman from the Christopher Nolan films exists in a universe without a Superman. On the other hand, the George Clooney Batman did mention Superman in Batman and Robin, and I think the previous film alluded to Metropolis. And there's a passing reference to Gotham City in Superman Returns.