Tuesday number: $479,917 for $217,649,868 so far.
STID "tracking" for $85-90 million opening [U.S. box office]
- Thread starter RAMA
- Start date
Both "X-Men" and "Blade" made LESS than "batman returns" and "batman forever." Far from "becoming a joke," "Batman Returns" and "Batman Forever" were successfull blockbusters. Only "Batman and Robin" was a bomb, and that was '97.
"Blade"--- $70 million 1998
"X-Men"--- $150 million 2000
"Batman Returns"--- $162 million 1992
"Batman Forever"---- $184 million 1995
I can maybe buy the argument that "X-Men" got the foot in the door, but I don't buy that it was "Blade." It wasn't a blockbuster, wasn't thought of as a superhero movie, and was R-rated.
I still go with "Spider-Man" starting the modern wave.
Yeah, people often lump the Schumacher films together these days, but Batman Forever was a big hit. If Schumacher had kept things at that level, rather than dialing it up to 11, he probably would have ended up making Batman films for some time to come.
I'd say X-Men started it and Spider-Man super-charged it.
agreed on the Schumacher thing
and I can go with the "X-Men started it, Spider-Man super-charged it" argument.
I said Blade started the current superhero craze, not that it was the most popular. It was successful with using a superhero character, leading the other studios to take more chances with the genre.
If you want to argue most popular superhero movie, that would be the Avengers, but that didn't start anything.
If you want to argue most popular superhero movie, that would be the Avengers, but that didn't start anything.
For the last time: I'm not talking about how much money they made.
Most of the public saw Blade as a vampire action movie, not as a superhero movie. It opened some doors for Marvel behind the scenes, but it was X-Men and Spider-Man that made a big impact in terms of general audience and media perceptions of superhero movies and that led the studios to develop more movies in the genre.
uh-huh. So what did you mean by "take off" or "become a joke?" How does one rate the success or failure of a big-budget comic book movie if not by box office?
Worldwide: $431,049,868
In the former case, led to move movies, whereas the last two Batman flicks resulted in zero. And in the latter case, everybody laughed at them. Franchises that are poorly regarded by people, not critics, become financial failures. Besides, even in the heyday of Supes and Batman, they were pretty much the only two around. What X-Men showed is that the genre was commercially viable again.
EDIT: and the last movie of each franchise, Superman and Batman, lost money.
Box office is short-term success, sure. Viability, the long-term success, is trickier.
Batman Forever still had other studios wanting to chase that kind of box office. Marvel was pushing to get films made at that point precisely because of how much money Batman was still making circa 1995. Thereafter Batman faltered and the Marvel films stepped in as the impetus of the next wave of films.
Batman led to a fair number of comic book movies in the 1990s, far more than had been made in the 1980s. The wave from the 2000s that continues through to the present is again that much larger. Each wave has gotten bigger in succession.
The original "Batman" and "Superman" film series each lasted for four films, and five of the eight were extremely successfull. A four-film series is a huge success by any measure. Just looking at the last film of each series to prove that they eventually wound down is an unfair comparison.
By that standard, the failures of "daredevil," "catwoman," "hulk," and "elektra" prove that the 2000s were a bad decade for comic book movies.
Blade is not a superhero. He's a comic book character. If appearing in a comicbook makes you a super hero then Scrooge McDuck is also a superhero.
It's pretty funny how you avoid addressing my actual argument. You act as though Batman And Robin and Superman IV never existed. Those are the movies that sunk the franchises, and in each case the previous outings were of markedly lower quality than the first two chapters. The superhero genre was in dire straights, and Marvel stepped in, as Out of My Vulcan Mind pointed out.
Blade is a superhero. He is even listed as part of the superhero genre on boxofficemojo.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=blade.htm
I did address your argument. Your argument is to ignore the huge successes of both franchises in order to focus on the ONE FILM in each series that did poorly.(and actually, "batman and robin" STILL made $107 million domestically)
And as I pointed out, ignoring the successes to focus on the failures is not a fair way of looking at it.
That's nice. Like others, they conflate comic book with superhero. Blade is a guy who hunts Vampires and is a human/vampire hybrid. He was created in the Tomb of Dracula series, a horror comic. So, is Jack Russell, the central character in Werewolf By Night also a Superhero?
