Are Comic Book Movies Ruining Summer Yet?

The second thing I ever wrote for iFanboy in 2008 was the "counter" half of a point/counterpoint that asked, “Are Comic Book Movies Ruining Summer?” Chris Nashawaty had just written some contrarian comment bait for Entertainment Weekly in which he took a couple more potshots at Elektra and asked with a straight face why they didn’t make classics like Armageddon anymore. While all I had to do was learn how to roll my eyes with a keyboard, fellow newbie Mike Romo took the “point” and had the unenviable task of finding a way to side with this gentleman as a writer on a comic book site. (And this was essentially Mike’s introduction to the readership, by the way.)

Mike did some verbal judo and turned Nashawaty’s griping into a conversation about market saturation. Were the studios going to flood the market and exhaust the audience’s patience for this sort of nonsense?

Three years in the future, I read this article again and say, out loud, “Oh, that is adorable. Were we ever so young?”

I love going back and looking at stuff like this every so often, the iFanboy piece and the EW piece alike. It gives one a healthy dose of perspective when one is prone to bouts of fretfulness. These articles were published a month after Iron Man, and about six weeks before The Dark Knight came out.

“Christopher Nolan is supertalented, but this is the sixth Batman movie in the past 20 years,” said Nashawaty.

“We've seen superhero team movies work (X-Men 1 and 2) but, I mean, really – look at this list. Ant-Man? Thor? Even Captain America is too much for me,” said Romo.

“Mark my words: Ant-Man is going to be the best movie of the lot of 'em,” said I.

“If we had five superhero movies every summer things would end really quickly,” commented one Conor Kilpatrick.

This seemed like a good summer to check back in on this question for some reason.

To be fair, 2008 was a good summer for “Uh-oh.” Well, actually, it was a good summer for “Oh my God, the culture is giving us everything we ever wanted,” but us being us, we found a way to make that into “Uh-oh.” “Uh-oh: now the culture is going to turn on us.” Everything is the prom scene from Carrie.

It just seemed so bonkers that summer, you almost couldn’t help but “Uh-oh.” There were movies about Iron Man, Batman, the Hulk, Wanted (!) and Hellboy—Hellboy! For a second time!—coming out in this barrage over the course of a couple weeks. And we still had The Spirit and Punisher: War Zone to look forward to at Christmas. Those holiday treats were still off in Schrodinger’s stocking, being hypothetically good.

We have since endured Punisher: War Zone, The Spirit, and many more reputation-tainting misfires and surprise gems. The X-Men franchise has survived The Legend of Wolverine’s Jacket. Jonah Hex is exchanging knowing glances with Howard the Duck in purgatory. Surrogates and Whiteout got what they got. Scott Pilgrim got made, impeccably, and I once saw a poster for it that was the size of a high-rise. The sixth Batman movie in twenty years won somebody an Oscar. We finally got Watchmen out of our systems and can move on, Hallelujah.

(Nashawaty made an exception for Watchmen in his article. How’d that work out?)

And all the while, they kept on coming. This is just the last three years, mind you, and I have left a lot of things out. Even during the barrage of 2008, this summer would have seemed unbelievable.

Nobody is asking this question about comic book/superhero movies anymore, either, at least not that I have seen. Absolute dreck plops onto the screen, and I don’t see anybody saying, “Ohhh, party’s over!” like I used to. Green Lantern was a gigantic sigh, and I hardly heard anyone fret about the sequel. People didn’t wonder if it meant the end of comic book movies; they didn’t even wonder if it meant the end of Green Lantern movies. And they needn’t have worried.

The reasons why are not complicated. Nobody’s crabbing about superheroes ruining summer movies or the never-ending flood because the movies have been good. You can make fifty movies about singing penguins if the movies are good. (Warning: they will not be.) There’s been garbage, too, of course, but just spitballing I’d guess we’ve had two Thors for every Jonah Hex and that’s enough to keep us off the radar. (The notable exception would have to be Roger Ebert, whose reviews of comic book adaptations this year are approaching pure spite. I think he’s just sick of the 3D glasses and is taking it out on the movies. Also, he gave Phantom Menace four stars, so clearly the engineer can’t even remember the last time he saw those rails. But I digress.)

The studios are being more judicious about this stuff than they used to be, too. They all saw what happened to Batman in the nineties. That was a lot of free money they threw away for Bat-nipples. Generally speaking, they’re not just going to cast Shaq and let him rap the theme song. While they have ravenously devoured everything that even resembles a tentpole, they’re not haphazardly shoveling crap onto the screen like coal into a locomotive. They’re hiring people who care and spending enough money that the climactic battle doesn’t take place in the Statue of Liberty gift shop.

In summation: all is well. Be of good cheer. The market is getting exactly what it wants, and comic book movies still aren’t ruining summer. If anything, they’re saving summer.

At least, that’s the way it looks right now. I’ll be bookmarking this page for 2014.

God, Jim Mroczkowski is getting old. He’s still hip, though: he knows about The Twitters.