Hopefully with the success of Warcraft & Assassin's Creed movies we will go into video game movie overdrive! 
A Witcher film would be epic!
A Witcher film would be epic!
2016: Year of Superhero Overdrive
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I'm not opposed to superhero films, but I am tired of the ones we've been getting, many of which are becoming formulaic and act more as trailers for the next big event.
Let the races begin!
I'm excited for all of them!
Competition breeds excellence. Fox, Marvel and WB are out to make the best movie and television properties they can. Gone are the days of Batman and Robin, Hulk (2003) and Daredevil (2003).
Catch up Sony. You're falling behind.
I'm excited for all of them!
Competition breeds excellence. Fox, Marvel and WB are out to make the best movie and television properties they can. Gone are the days of Batman and Robin, Hulk (2003) and Daredevil (2003).
Catch up Sony. You're falling behind.
Universal needs to get that Namor movie going!
Wrong question. Superhero/comic is now a mainstream genre, much like fantasy and science fiction. Nobody's ever going to say the market is oversaturated with fantasy movies or science fiction movies. Face it, superhero movies are here to stay, permanently.
Westerns and Scfi genres were mainstream too, once upon a time. Spielberg talked about superhero movies going the way of the western earlier this year. People will move on, and fads can die.
Sci Fi hasn't died at all, it just doesn't go out into space as often as it used to. And while westerns definitely lost the majority of their popularity, they still get made on a regular basis (pretty much at least once a year, if not more).
Err, aren't you forgetting Fant4stic, or whatever it was called? Not to mention the staggering awfulness of Gotham. No matter how many good movies and shows there are in a genre, there will always be bad ones too.
Didn't, you mean. In the past couple of years, we've seen a trend back toward space-based movies and shows.
And as usual, the mass-media SF stuff is echoing the trends of the literature from a couple of decades earlier. Back in the '80s and '90s, the emphasis in prose SF shifted toward Earthbound genres like cyberpunk and near-future dystopia, with "space opera" developing a reputation as an outmoded and hackneyed genre. But in the later '90s and '00s, a new wave of authors like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and the like revitalized space-based and far-future SF, turning "space opera" from a derogatory label into a positive one. So it's not surprising that the mass media is now going through the same pendulum swing back toward space-based SF. It was due to happen about now.
I think that, to an extent, SF took over the cultural niche of Westerns. Westerns were stories about pioneers on the frontier, people existing beyond the limits of civilization and confronting indigenous populations, trying to survive adversity, or the like. But those same kinds of stories can be told in the context of space opera or a post-apocalyptic world or an alternate history -- and without having to deal with the uncomfortable historical and racial truths that underlie the frontier mythology of the Western. So if you look at Westerns at just a subset of the larger category of frontier narratives, then that category hasn't faded in popularity at all, just changed form.
Hopefully with the success of Warcraft & Assassin's Creed movies we will go into video game movie overdrive!
A Witcher film would be epic!
As long as we don't get PIXEL 2.
Admittedly, yes. I did forget about the recent FF movie X( . Can you blame me? I don't watch Gotham, so I can't comment on it. It hasn't been cancelled, so some people like it, I suppose.
My mistake. When I think Scifi it is the outer space kind, like The Expanse. However, things like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, Chappie and others, all qualify as scifi.
When I think mainstream scifi popularity, I think of post 1977 scifi craze. After Star Wars and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind hit, we had:
Superman TM (1978) from WB, Star Trek TPM (1979) from Paramount, James Bond Moonraker (1979) from MGM, Flash Gordon (1980) from Universal, Alien (1979) 20th Century Fox. Etc
This was in my mind when I commented on the superhero genre eventually dying. We're approaching a similar kind of threshold, I think.
Superheroes are a subgenre of SF/Fantasy, along with dystopian YA adventures the currently trending subgenre. But trends do eventually change.
Superheroes translate to film amazingly well as long as the effects are good. I'm sure we'll reach a tipping point where the mainstream audience stops caring, & I'm sure Disney/Marvel will be the ones who tip us over. Sort of like how Batman & Robin killed it last time - though it will come back again.
I'm not sure that analogy works. At that time, superhero films were rare enough that a single bad film could be seen as representative of the whole genre and make studios unwilling to gamble on that genre. But there are so many superhero films now, in so many different styles, that one disaster like Fantastic Four doesn't have as big an impact on the studios' or the public's perception of the entire genre. It's seen as the exception rather than the rule. If we get a lot of superhero films that bomb in quick succession, that could sour studios on the genre, but that won't happen as long as we still have a fair number of box-office and critical successes to balance out the occasional dud.
Not to mention that Batman and Robin bombed in 97, Blade was successful in 98 and X-men started filming in 99 (and in the same year Spider-Man escaped development hell and entered production).
The only thing Batman and Robin killed was audience interest in a Batman movie, and even that lasted less than a decade.
People didn't bother going to see FF because they were bored of superhero movies, it was because A. It looked lame, and B. All the reviews said it was lame. Seriously lame.
The same reason any 'big' movie flops no matter the genre, ie like a lot of recent Johnny Depp fare.
At least now we're past that 00s run where an awful lot were pretty crappy- Elektra, Ghost Rider, Catwoman, or just letdowns- X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, Superman Returns, the two FF movies etc
(feel free to include Daredevil in there somewhere too, I actually don't mind it
)
At least now, though everyone may not be a classic, the vast majority are actually pretty decent movies. Of the 4 in 2014 you have DOFP, Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, all pretty top notch in the genre. Some may not like Amazing Spider-Man 2 (I think it ain't bad) but even that is hardly anywhere near the level of a Catwoman or Elektra.
And even the less-than-amazing MCU movies like Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World are far better than Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3 IMO
The same reason any 'big' movie flops no matter the genre, ie like a lot of recent Johnny Depp fare.
At least now we're past that 00s run where an awful lot were pretty crappy- Elektra, Ghost Rider, Catwoman, or just letdowns- X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, Superman Returns, the two FF movies etc
(feel free to include Daredevil in there somewhere too, I actually don't mind it
)At least now, though everyone may not be a classic, the vast majority are actually pretty decent movies. Of the 4 in 2014 you have DOFP, Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, all pretty top notch in the genre. Some may not like Amazing Spider-Man 2 (I think it ain't bad) but even that is hardly anywhere near the level of a Catwoman or Elektra.
And even the less-than-amazing MCU movies like Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World are far better than Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3 IMO
That's the thing though, we're jumping form an average of 4 per year to 8 per year for the next two years.
That's a pretty big jump.
I think that it will more likely be Marvel Studios' competitors that do that. Marvel has generally put out a very consistent product in terms of quality and profitability.
OTOH, if Marvel continues to do fine and dandy, but their competitors flounder, I don't see that deterring Marvel from continuing to do exactly what they've been doing...so maybe it would take some major failures from the leaders of the pack to bring down the house of cards.
Excellent point. I think a lot of the "genre-killer" rhetoric is largely manufactured by the media to generate stories. It's a lot more dramatic to say an entire genre is doomed than it is to acknowledge that rises and falls in popularity are normal in any genre and really not that big a deal in the long run.
(feel free to include Daredevil in there somewhere too, I actually don't mind it
The theatrical cut is a mess, but the director's cut is relatively solid.
ASM2 is the best Spidey movie ever where Peter/Spidey, Gwen, and Aunt May are concerned. Unfortunately, it gets everything else wrong.
I actually don't dislike either of those third movies as much as most people do. SM3 is a little self-indulgent and would've been better if Venom had been left out, but I think it's a reasonably good climax to the trilogy and resolves Harry's arc pretty well. And X-Men: The Last Stand is certainly flawed, but it has its moments that I think are well-done, and it's definitely much better than Origins: Wolverine.
I think the fact that they are making different types of superhero movies will help keep them popular. They really aren't all the same.
We've gotten space sci-fi/comedy with Guardians, political thriller with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, epic fantasy with Thor: The Dark World, and Ant-Man was a heist movie/comedy. And they were all good. I think as long as that diversity and quality is there we will continue to see superhero movies, and since I've been really enjoyed them, I don't mind.
As for next year's movies, I think the ones with the most uncertain chances would be Doctor Strange, Deadpool, Gambit and Suicide Squad. All four are new properties and will be very different from most of the other superhero movies coming out. I'm really looking forward to them, but I think people who aren't as into these kinds of movies might not be sure what to make of them.
I think pretty much all of rest will be guaranteed hits, based off of the popularity of their series. Batman v Superman also has the advantage of giving us a pairing people have been wanting to see on the big screen for decades.
Next year's superhero movies are all some of my most anticipated movies. The only one I'm not sure about right now is Gambit. I like the versions of the character I've seen, but I'm not entirely sure he deserves a whole movie to himself.
We've gotten space sci-fi/comedy with Guardians, political thriller with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, epic fantasy with Thor: The Dark World, and Ant-Man was a heist movie/comedy. And they were all good. I think as long as that diversity and quality is there we will continue to see superhero movies, and since I've been really enjoyed them, I don't mind.
As for next year's movies, I think the ones with the most uncertain chances would be Doctor Strange, Deadpool, Gambit and Suicide Squad. All four are new properties and will be very different from most of the other superhero movies coming out. I'm really looking forward to them, but I think people who aren't as into these kinds of movies might not be sure what to make of them.
I think pretty much all of rest will be guaranteed hits, based off of the popularity of their series. Batman v Superman also has the advantage of giving us a pairing people have been wanting to see on the big screen for decades.
Next year's superhero movies are all some of my most anticipated movies. The only one I'm not sure about right now is Gambit. I like the versions of the character I've seen, but I'm not entirely sure he deserves a whole movie to himself.
Right. The thing is, people call them superhero movies, but they're really comic-book movies, and comic books are themselves a very eclectic mix of genres to begin with. Superheroes have been the dominant paradigm in comics since the 1960s, but that mode of storytelling absorbed the tropes from the more eclectic styles of comics that had been published before then, from pulp detective stories to sci-fi to monster and horror stories to war stories to high fantasy to romance to Western/historical to humor. Lots of the characters in the Marvel universe originated in genres other than superhero fiction -- Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos in war comics, Patsy Walker in romance comics, Hank Pym, Fin Fang Foom, and Groot in monster comics, etc. The Fantastic Four was really a monster comic for its first two issue before shifting to a more superheroic vein. DC has heroes as eclectic as the sci-fi adventurer Adam Strange, the Western hero Vigilante, and the Arthurian Shining Knight (not to mention Etrigan the Demon).
So we're not really just talking about superheroes here. We're talking about comic books as a source of stories for moviemakers. And they are a rich, diverse source of material that still has a long way to go before it's mined out.
