They are going ahead with a Justice League movie

But wasn't a lot of that Superman budget due to pre-production waste and the failed attempts previous to the movie that finally got made?

 

I wonder what the numbers would look like with out those costs?

 

HOLY JEBUS!

 

I'm not so sure.. i believe the main audience of today's superhero movies consists of about 80% general audience who just want to see some hyped up, cool action movie with big scenes and cool special effects.

Apart from the biggest heroes like Superman, Batman, Spiderman and maybe X-Men they will know precious little about the backstories of characters beforehand.. ask any non-comic reader prior to Iron Man what they knew about Tony Stark and his main characteristics (i bet they wouldn't even know that in the comics he's an alcoholic which also was one of his most major storylines).

This is what Marvel absolutely did right.. take Captain America for example. Most people know about this guy in the star spangled uniform and his shield but that's about it. Maybe some remember a bit more if they read comics as a kid but it's not the majority.
So they made his intro movie complete with backstory and connected him to the greater Marvel movie universe (in fact.. his movie is essential if you want to get the whole Avengers picture) so we knew why Captain America was such a big deal and why Coulson was such a fangirl about him.

Depending on how they want to portray Wonder Woman and how important she is to the storyline it could take away from the whole movie if they have to spend time to introduce her and not let her be just this superstrong woman who could stand up to Superman in a fight.

I believe that number is a bit skewed because they included the money spent on the decade long development process including several team/director/producer changes and rewrites/test shots. Actual movie costs would most likely be in the "standard" range for movies this size.. i guess somewhere around the 150 million mark (and i still always wonder where all this money goes).

 

It's a chance to see Superman and Batman in the same movie, who's not going to want to see that?!

 

^That's a good point. I'd certainly go to see such a movie. Once, at least. Repeated viewings (Saw Avengers five times) would depend upon the quality of the product. I sat through Batman and Robin and Superman Returns in the theater as well. Once.

They can't just depend upon the concept of a good super-hero movie becoming a good mega-successful super-hero movie. I mean sure, a lot of people will see it anyway.

Once, at least.

 

Exactly, I mean I don't want Superman and Batman to overshadow the rest of the League, but to generate excitement without building the movie universe I think they're going to have to go the "iconic legends meeting for the first time" route.

 

Which only reinforces my point. Most of the target audience would have little prior perception of Wonder Woman at all, and those that did are more likely to know her from the JL animated series than from the old '70s show. So it doesn't make sense to assume that the '70s series will dictate how the movie's audience perceives Wonder Woman.

Well, the premiere episode of Justice League managed to cover her origins pretty well in about two minutes, although they trimmed out the traditional contest sequence.

 

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But what's being pointed out is that Superman Returns didn't fail on it's own merit. Before a dime was actually spent towards the movie, it was already carrying about a $150Million burden from previous false starts. If it wasn't burdened with that previously spent budget, it would have performed a slight bit better than Batman Begins. It was front loaded to fail

 

That's right.

And I remember at the time when BB was released, there was kind of a perception in the media that it had under-performed at the box office, when compared to the mega-bucks that Batman or Batman Forever had raked in. You had an actor who wasn't that big a draw in the lead, surrounded by character actors - there was no stand-out superstar like Nicholson or Carrey playing a well-known villain (Ras and Scarecrow didn't have the same recognition value as Joker or Riddler).

The main difference between SR and BB - apart from the fact that BB wasn't saddled with the budgets for all the previous attempts to get a Batman movie off the ground - was that the latter seemed to enjoy a more positive response among fans and, perhaps more importantly, sold better on DVD, thus building up demand for a sequel. I personally like Returns a lot but I wasn't overly anxious to see what happened next in that universe, whereas I couldn't wait to see what Nolan and Bale's Batman did next.

 

A couple of points:

1. Are you sure BB wasn't saddled with the budgets for some of the abortive attempts at doing "Batman V," "Superman vs Batman," the Fincher Batman, etc.?
2. I could be wrong, but I think that SR was a money loser compared to BB even if you factor out the budgets for the abortive attempts.
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^ 1. I don't believe so. But don't forget that those Batman abortive efforts you mention never got anywhere near as far as the Superman abortive efforts. For example, Nic Cage and Tim Burton got 'play or pay' deals for Superman Lives and Kevin Smith got paid for writing a script. Then you had concept art, suit designs and tests, etc.

McG had a similar deal (I believe) for Flyby and JJ Abrams got paid for doing the script. There was a casting and audition process and the movie was almost set to shoot in Australia. And the Superman-reboot saga had dragged on since the early 1990s, with Returns hitting the screen in 2006; the other Batman projects, which never really went beyond concepts, only began after B&R in 1997, with BB being released in 2005.

2. I don't think that's right. I think it broke even but only modestly so.

 

From what I've read in the past, one indicator of where all the money goes is to look at the number of executive producers credited.

 

I'm well aware of the concept of profit. The quote marks around well are there for a reason.

 

But who would have watched the animated series? It's the 20% i estimated who would already know more background about the characters and who don't need any introduction but the other 80% who just want to see the latest blockbuster. They might not have seen the 70s show (far before most of them) and most of them don't watch superhero animated shows so you would need to introduce her if she has any vital role to play other than eye candy.

This is what i feel will distract from the movie itself.. all those origin stories need to be included apart from Superman and Batman who have really been done to death and have entered the public mind so if they don't want to do a Superman/Batman team up movies with some other characters thrown in like an afterthought they need to slow it down a bit and maybe follow the Marvel approach a bit better.. it worked for them and i believe DC has equally interesting characters to develop.

 

You could handle all the introductions in the title sequence. You dont need long or complex intros to these characters. We dont need to know how Flash got his powers just that he has them.

 

Agreed. I bet it could be done with no more than ten seconds per hero, all in moving pictures (to the musical soundtrack of the main title), and possibly even in five seconds each.

 

It could be done in a similar way to the beginnings of Watchmen and Wolverine.

 

For the third time... I never said that most or all of the target audience would be familiar with the animated series. I said that of those who had any prior familiarity at all, which would of course be the minority of the target audience, they'd be more likely to know her from JL/U than from the '70s series.

Yes, obviously, and I'm saying that we know it's possible to do so quickly and efficiently because JL: "Secret Origins" managed to do so. I wasn't saying that the moviegoers would've already seen "Secret Origins" -- I was using it as precedent, an example to demonstrate that Wonder Woman's backstory can be quickly introduced to the uninitiated in the context of a JL movie, that it could be done without requiring 20 minutes of setup.

I don't agree that origin stories need to be included. They're necessary in the kind of movie world where there's only one superhero, an anomaly whose presence needs to be justified. But if a story is set in a world that explicitly has many superheroes, you don't need an explanation for where every one of them came from. The Incredibles didn't give us an origin story for any of its adult characters, except Syndrome. Mystery Men introduced a whole team of also-ran heroes and one major hero, and didn't give them origins. It's possible to just establish a superhero universe "already in progress," just treat it as a given that heroes exist and have powers due to a variety of mechanisms, and focus the story on who they are now rather than where they came from.

By analogy, cop movies don't require explaining to us why each police officer chose to join the force and how they trained for their job. Spy movies don't need to show us the reasons why their protagonists became spies. Space operas don't generally explain why their starship crews chose to go into space. In a genre where a particular role or profession is just a normative part of the world, then it isn't necessary to go into depth about the reasons behind every character's entry into that role.