And now Oates weighs in…
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The film is expected to slip from its chart-topping perch this weekend, however, when Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits.
The agents for Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal will be celebrating.
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Tom Holland and Zendaya are having a very good summer, it would seem. Good for them.
I did see the trailer for the new Spider Man film attached to The Odyssey and, I had to admit, I thought it looked pretty good.
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Not a fan of Holland or his Spider-Man movies. Feedback hasn’t been the best on this instalment and I’ll be giving it a pass. They’re always going to make money, but I feel the franchise has become repetitious, needs a good break and change of pace. Nothing will top the Raimi films in my opinion. They had the required heart and soul. While I still like those, the older I became the more I grew out of the character. Which is natural considering the teenage centric focus most of the content has. My Batman fandom has never wavered.
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They should have done at least two more with Garfield and the Spider-Gwen story and loose the teenage centric focus with a grown-up Peter Parker like in the comics
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Another Stephen King adaptation in the works:
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One comic book hero that works at the box office.
Why?
Because he is widely known, mostly fun and appeals to the youth market.
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Also–he is a stand-alone character, whose story has remained consistent over the years. Even I can drop in on a Spider-Man movie and know what is happening.
$927 million worldwide. Amazing Spider-Man indeed.
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Calling this a monster result is putting it mildly. Absolutely staggering. Glad to see it, though. I want the cinemas to do well and this certainly helps.
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Incredible.
Also makes the DC box office numbers look even worse by comparison.
Pretty good couple of weeks it’s been for Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal.
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Always difficult to gauge this from ‘outside’ but is DC in general even all that popular - Superman and Batman apart? I was already surprised Wonder Woman made it to the screen, she wasn’t all that popular back in my day - admittedly not relevant 50 years later - and didn’t make it beyond a few issues in her own title in Germany. Nor was the Justice League a big draw for kids here; the Legion of Superheroes with Superboy was the far more popular team as I recall it.
But which average Joe or Jane not inside the fanbase would even recall these obscure names and players? And be tempted to spend on a theatre ticket for a few hazy memories? Maybe the idea of a DC Universe was always only appealing to a niche hardcore base surrounded by a bigger but much more casual audience. People willing to binge a season of Daredevil on Netflix - but not all that bothered when these shows end or move to a different streamer.
In other words, is DC really more than Batman and Superman to the wider audience?
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I‘d say no. WB just thought „Marvel is not the only brand able to print money“ - and then found out that a) DC is not as popular and b) audiences are saturated by Marvel.
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DC is selling more comics than Marvel, but obviously that’s another question.
My reading is that the average person doesn’t know or care which “B-list” hero belongs to which company and to the extent they do know names like Hawkeye, Ant-Man or Black Widow where they don’t know Green Arrow, Atom or Black Canary, it’s not because the characters are any more popular or familiar based on their comic book careers; it’s because they were in Marvel movies. If you’re in a Marvel movie, people will find out who you are, and THEN maybe they’ll follow you to another film…but only because it’s another Marvel film. Marvel knows this and they’ve been brilliant in exploiting it to get a lot of characters out there in front of eyeballs.
That is to say, for some time now it’s not been the characters driving these things but the Marvel banner itself. Though we are starting to see the limits, to some degree you could put out a movie about any character and if it’s got the Marvel banner attached to it, people will go see it. They may not have ever heard of the characters before (Guardians of the Galaxy?) but they know they can expect certain things from a Marvel film, so they’re willing to give it a go.
DC on the other hand has a pretty lousy track record on screen, so they need to trade on the appeal of the characters instead of their company logo (which indeed may even be an albatross at this point). Superman and Batman are universally known – often thanks to projects from decades in the past – but the others not so much.
This is why I’m skeptical when people read Brand New Day’s success as “proof there’s no such thing as superhero fatigue.” In my mind, all it proves is that people love Spider-Man, which is not really the same thing. Spider-Man will always sell tickets, other Marvel characters need the Marvel name attached. Or better yet, they need to appear in a Spider-Man movie so some of the love audiences have for Spidey will rub off on them. Spider-Man is bigger than Marvel, Superman is bigger than DC. But in Spidey’s case, his own clout plus that of the Marvel name is an unbeatable combo.
I think in the end it comes down to whether people feel entertained. At the moment, more readers seem to buy DC comics, while more moviegoers (including lots of folks from the first group) prefer to see Marvel movies. And in both cases it’s for the same reason: a track record that either leads you to expect the best or the worst.
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If I just look at the data until, say, 2000 then the successful DC films - SUPERMAN and sequels, BATMAN and sequels - outnumbered the Marvel stuff, and were there before Marvel even started in earnest. The reasoning would have been to just take back the lead they had before. If you asked a random set of people on the street in, say, 1990 after a superhero they’d have probably answered Superman/Batman eight times out of 10.
However, the Marvel stuff has a slightly different context and relevance, X Men and Spider-Man effectively being youth outsiders dealing with their difficulties, not fitting in, having to make do, minorities haunted by youth angst and ostracised by society. Even Thor, Hulk and Iron Man are alter egos of disabled and/or deeply addicted characters. There is a psychological dimension to these figures that appeals to teenagers in a different way than the super-human alien or the millionaire vigilante.
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I think it’s largely down to the fact that Marvel was able to develop a successful blueprint for sustainable success on the big screen, by interweaving their films together and using the success of the bigger names under their umbrella to help lift up some of the lesser known ones into more known entities that could then go on and sustain their own franchises (i.e. Guardians and Ant-Man, etc.)
They started with a vision and then executed on that. DC has been changing the direction of what they’re doing far too often, trying to chase the results that Marvel has had, which will only come by acting on one over-arching vision. DC both tried to fast track things and jump to the Justice League far too quickly in order to catch up as well as doing so based on blueprints for the overall DCU that were heavily flawed from the outset and continue to be flawed in the present.
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Fact.
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If I am honest I only new as a boy and teenager Superman, Batman and Spiderman and read a handfull of comics about them and I mean a handfull of them together, so that isn’t much.
Hulk and Wonderwoman I only new from the tv series I had no clue that they were based on comics. I once saw and read a comic from the Hulk and I thought it was a fake, because it was completely different than the tv series (he could talk and jump very far).
I had never heard of the others before it became movies, and others I seemed to have a vague recollection of seeing some comics in a store or as comic tv series like X-men, Iron Man, but I didn’t know anything about them at all.
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Revised numbers have Spider Man as the biggest opening ever.
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