Superhero movies: supersmashes or superblesses

Everybody who has kept an eye on the celluloid industry for the last three years must have noticed that a great number of the movies that have made it big time the last couple of years and are, or have been, in the spotlights this year are movies based comic book properties, superhero comic books in particular. The current superhero tsunami started in 2000 with the release of X-men, which was followed by movies as Blade, Spider-man, X2, and many more are waiting to be released in the next couple of months and years. However, the theme of superheroes has not always been that popular in the movie industry. Just as Superman was the first American comic book superhero, he was also the first superhero to be featured in a superhero movie based on a comic book character. The movie, Superman, was released in 1941 and several other movies followed in the next 35 years, but it was Superman (1978) starring Christopher Reeve that is considered to be the first successful superhero movie and has paved the way for all those which followed. After the movie grossed six times its budget, a sequel just had to follow and successfully did so. In 1980, Superman II was released and be

The main problem with making movies on fantastic material like superhero comic books is, is that it is easy to indulge too much in the fictional realm of comic books where everything is possible and loose all links with reality, thus undermining the movie's believability. The result of losing the links with the realm of real-life has often resulted in campy movies. Generation-X (1996) suffered from this problem, just like the Adam West-starring 1966 Batman movie and the last two installments in the Batman and Superman franchise. An interesting note here is that the latter two (both owned by DC Comics) live in fictional cities, Gotham and Metropolis, while characters like Blade, Spider-man, and the X-men (all owned by Marvel Comics) live in existing cities.

That is where you reach the economic side of the diamond. Because the audience stayed away from the last Superman and Batman movies, movie companies have been reluctant to invest their money in expensive movies they thought nobody to see anymore. Fortunately for superhero movies have movie executives changed that opinion the last three years and have budgets increased immensely over the last decades making it at least financially possible to pull off the expensive to visualize world of superheroes.

The key phrase in avoiding this problem is realizing the restrictions and possibilities of the comic book and cinematic medium. In other words: what can and cannot acceptably be done in the one medium compared to the other. This is where the 4-sided screenwriting diamond comes into play.

Some topics in this essay:
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