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MOVIE ARTICLES - Superhero Movies
Hollywood's Fascination with the Comic
Book Superhero
by Dave Gieber
Movie production companies and TV have been creating feature
length movies, movie serials and TV shows for years exploiting
the public fascination with Superheroes. But as special
effect technology and costume designs became better and
better, Hollywood kicked it up a notch with feature-length
high budget productions. Superman, the Movie and the 3
sequels started in the 1970s and the '90s and beyond brought
us Batman, The Hulk, the X-Men and the now infamous Spider-Man,
to name a few.
Why all this interest in producing Superhero movies? Big
bucks!! The two Spider-Man movies alone have netted about
800 million dollars apiece in worldwide ticket sales.
That's not chicken feed. This kind of income could not
be generated without an avid public interest in Superheroes.
So if you feel you are alone in your voracious passion
for your own comic book collection, think again.
And now a new twist has been added. Directors, screenplay
writers, and even actors are writing for, of all things,
comic books now. Big name Hollywood writers are helping
to sell more comics. For example, Joss Whedon, perhaps
best known for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has
written stories for Marvel in the series Astonishing X-Men.
Back in the 90s, who would have known that all these fan
boys had been hiding in the Hollywood woodworks waiting
for comics to gain some cultural credibility?
If you haven't followed some of the comic news of the
last several months, Stan "the man" Lee has
been fighting his personal battle with His life long employer,
Marvel Comics. Stan is probably one of the most well known
character creators in the comic book industry. He has
characters like Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk credited
to his creative imagination. Seems Stan had a contractual
agreement with Marvel for 10% of any revenue acquired
by Marvel from movies and TV projects centered on Stan
characters. But apparently the high dollar superstructure
of the corporate mind doesn't want to part with all their
income. Now this is nothing new, but Stan Lee managed
to win the first round for the little guy. The judge presiding
over Stan's case agreed that Stan should receive his share
of the agreed on profits. Now maybe Stan will get his
share and maybe he won't. Sounds like Marvel will be appealing
the decision. At any rate, if there weren't big bucks
involved in the production of comic book Superhero movies,
this case would not have been such an issue.
I believe the near future is going to bring many more
of my favorite heroes to the silver screen. I have already
started my own DVD collection and as more heroes get transferred
from the screen to round disc, I will continue to increase
the size of my collection. Do you think a DVD superhero
collection will be worth as much as a comic book collection
in the future? Probably not, but that won't stop me from
building my collection anyway.
About the Author
Dave Gieber, a former rocket engineer, has decided to
take up residency on the Internet. He is the owner and
editor of several websites, one of which was built around
one of his childhood passions; www.comic-book-collection-made-easy.com.
You can visit here to keep up to date on the world of
comic books and comic book collecting. Feel free to sign
up for my comic book ezine at
www.comic-book-collection-made-easy.com/comic-book-ezine.html |
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