Super Heroes… You, me, we all grew up with them. Our primary connection with them was COMICS!!!
It was a beautiful era, when a writer’s imagination was couples with a cartoon artist’s audacity of re-thinking the universe and its existence and there comes the combination to make us kids make a beeline in front of comics stores to read the next adventure of our favorite super heroes. From Superman to Iron Man to Spiderman to Batman. Everyone had a favorite and everyone was raving about their favorites and comparison was never ending.
Then came the cartoon movies and the visual effects on the animated series that made a few more legends on its way. There were certain characters that got their life from an animation series first and then came their comics as an afterthought to increase the sales numbers, worthy mentions are He-Man and the masters of Universe, Battle Cats and even as recent as Samurai Jack & Kung Fu Panda (Which first got a movie then a TV series and then a few comics)
And everything changed with that first Superman Movie in 1978, (some can cite Dr. Strange (1978) as one of the first movies of the super heroes – Note – Both movies were released in 1978). The trend got many directors to play with various characters for next 25 years and many superhero movies came in sporadic bursts since then.
Everything changed from the success of Spiderman trilogy (spread across 5 years 2002-2007), which made Marvel Studios to come up with Iron Man in 2008 and since then Marvel and DC together have come up with movies after movies to entertain, frustrate, re-live the past and re-visualize the respective universe of these super heroes.
People received these adventures with massive appreciation with certain blips in between. The cart below shows how well the collections of these on the box office and the love shown by the audiences overall. One surprise entry in this was Deadpool. The pet project of Ryan Gosling, showed that there is appetite for certain unsung or unassuming characters to catch audience notice and do surprisingly well.
Another movie not listed here was based on a fake superhero story comic Kickass. It attained such a cult following that it came out with its own sequel, though the sequel didn’t do so well on box office so Kickass 3 seems a distant possibility, but movies like this does show there are pockets of audience they can tap and remain profitable if done on smaller budgets and done well.
As the overall trend is overwhelmingly promising for these studios to keep churning out more superhero character movies to come. The chart below shows a pipeline for next few years and projects planned to release.
But isn’t this becoming overwhelming even to audiences and many fragments start to surface where now because of choices people will ditch the certain movies and characters like comics and focus on certain franchise only. The fatigue will translate into dwindling returns on certain super heroes. Whether that’s going to happen or not I leave it on you but be rest assured, there is loads of superhero action coming your way soon!!! BUCKLE UP & GET READY!!!
Thoughts Unplugged !!! 