Marvel Avenged: From financial ruin to the biggest film franchise in history

Audiences won't get bored as long as their are good stories to tell.

Then perhaps Wolverine can be true to the comic, womanizer and short 5'3''.

I, for one, like seeing the new heroes being introduced into the mix such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. Marvel has a large number of characters to rely on that haven't been introduced into the cinematic universe. Just because they are relatively unknown doesn't mean it won't work. Guardians was considered a risk because most people had no idea what they were, yet it did big numbers at the box office.

These stories can be told endlessly if they are done correctly. Not all of Marvel's characters are super-powered beings and some of the normal characters have interesting stories to tell. Daredevil on Netflix is a good example of this. It didn't even feel like a typical Marvel enterprise until the suit came into play. Up to that point it was an interesting drama with occasional action pieces. Agents of Shield is another; stories about mostly ordinary people dealing with living in this new world of super-beings and gods.

Where comic book movies/shows go wrong is when they are created to be commercials for selling toys and the story comes second. So far, Marvel has avoided this. Hopefully DC can do the same. If telling the story is always the most important aspect, then these things can last a long time before they get boring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_X5C6e3ZeY

Shame it was never released. Apparently it was so bad they tried to erase it from history.

This isn't really that hard to avoid, you know? You just need someone with enough central authority to stop the writers from doing this. It's not clever or compelling storytelling, it's just complicated. Said central authority doesn't have to write the story, per se, just prevent this from happening.

I'd also observe there's abundant cinematic precedent for having to change actors, and the Hulk has already been changed without it being a reboot or "new character".

Handled carefully there's no reason this universe MUST become crufty, overpopulated, and stale. It's just... the natural thing that happens when you aren't careful.

And I have hope that they may be careful. One of the undercurrents of the article they never quite called out all the way is that the Hollywood blockbuster machine is broken. Look at how well Marvel is doing, and by and large, they're doing it on good, solid storytelling. Not uniformly across the board, no, but much better than the average blockbusters. Hollywood is apparently willing to pour millions upon millions into special effects but often appears to spend about "$5.12 + whatever the director has in his wallet" on story... or, more accurately, they treat the story like that's the investment they have in it. Marvel is not hitting it out of the park every time, but they clearly care more than the Hollywood machine. Right now, if there's anybody who can hold this all together without an endless series of reboots, it's the Marvel movie guys.

Why? For instance James Bond worked just fine with simply replacing whomever was playing Bond from time to time.

> You can only drag someone to see an origin story so many times.

But rebooting ends up simply retelling origin stories over and over. How many times do you need to tell how Superman (yes I know that's DC) or Batman (again, DC) or Spiderman became themselves, or how their villains became them.

Apparently it's every 10 years for Spiderman.

The actual actor for these parts shouldn't matter. That they play the character and in the continuity should. But maybe I'm missing something, I never really got into comic books.

No other company in the US. Toei uses that term all over the place in Japan, and Marvel and DC can't do anything about it.

Source?

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4809%3Aa...

I happen to think CGI is the key element to make good comic book movies but despite how advanced it is now days, it's still not there yet. It's still too expensive to do it well, so it often gets half-assed and the cost also affects story lines, like less hulk, because hulk is expensive. The expense also affects greatly which characters they decide to bring into the stories at all.

The Fantastic Four series, one of the longest running in comics, is ending shortly. Speculation is that it's because of Fox's ownership of the Fantastic Four film rights.

It's a slightly strong-arm tactic, but also in the best interest of Marvel's bottom line. Why publish comic books with characters that appear in movies that you don't own.

Had Sony not been hacked, they would likely still control Spider-Man.

That's not why they rebooted. Amazing Spider-Man came about because somebody at Sony realized the rights would revert back to Marvel if they didn't make another movie in a certain amount of time, and they didn't have the time to reassemble the old cast and find a point where everybody's schedule was clear, so they just went with an all-new cast.

Look at the 1978 Superman movie, for instance; the big selling point there was that "you will believe a man can fly!" Never mind all the other stuff Superman can do in the comics; it was stretching the boundaries of the possible just to show him flying in a way that was convincing to an audience.

The advent of affordable CGI removed those limitations, of course, but by the time that came along there had built up this huge well of untapped source material and a big audience that grew up reading comics for which seeing this stuff on screen is completely novel. Eventually one or the other will dry out, and superhero movies will go back to being just one genre among many.

If you're meaning his own characters, there is that. But from now on he can likely do whatever he feels like. I hope he decides to tell a new story with new characters in the Buffy universe.

I also started with Marvel. It's characters are grittier, more humane, and all their "real life" troubles make them extremely relatable (spiderman is the best example).

As an adult, I started to gravitate towards DC. Their characters are larger than life, almost perfect gods. They are not people, they are walking symbols. Only as an adult did I get Superman.

(both have a lot more necessary digital effects and fantasy elements than the other comic book movies that were being produced at that time)

The Doom movie was only mostly taken seriously, but it made a real attempt at fleshing out a story rooted in the game, and at least wasn't hugely hindered by a limited budget.

[0] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803096/