Skip to main content

It's All About The Benjamins: My Less Than Nerdy Feelings On XMen

Here goes my nerd street cred, right out the proverbial window.

Having now seen "Thor" twice, I figured I may as well venture out and see more Marvel creations:
So I've just returned home from "X Men: First Class".  And while you might think I'm about to go on and on about story lines or maintaining the integrity of well-loved comic characters, I'm actually more interested in the business side of things.

In the past, comic movies were sort of a joke.  A big joke.  Not so much "comic-y" as just goofy, inane, and harmlessly juvenile - these big screen adaptations were (honestly) a poor representation of a maligned media.  The upper echelon has loved to hate comics (graphic novels and whatnot) since their inception.  A sad fact as comics have often tackled some very serious social issues, often in very dark, very intense, very adult ways.  Luckily, for us nerdy children, comics have finally broken into a more respected position and subsequently found their way into more serious, respected film genre.

Despite these leaps, many opportunities still remained on the table.  Until Marvel got smart and started leveraging the sheer powerhouse they were seated on; the famed "Marvel Universe".

Let's pause here and talk about the American film industry and its bottom lines.  Love it or hate it, the movie industry exists to turn a profit.  A by-product of that is that we, as audiences, get the chance to be entertained.  I'm not saying that there are not passionate, talented folks out there, within the "studio system", who aren't toiling away because they love what they do.  There are.  There really, really are.  But even those talented folks need to pay their bills.

Accepting that movies are a billion dollar industry and that everyone involved wants a piece of that, it's a wonder Marvel didn't strike sooner: with the wealth of material they have at their disposal, they have a nearly infinite potential to continue bringing in the cash.

Make one movie, make a million - make a never-ending string of inter-connected movies, well... your earning potential is unlimited.

Fucking brilliant.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rebuttal: 17 Disturbing Horror Movies You Will Never Watch Again

When I'm not watching movies, I'm reading about movies. I stumble across all kinds of articles, blog posts, book excerpts, etc. in my quest to absorb as much movie knowledge as possible. Now, I'm snotty and loud-mouthed and opinionated but I'd never begrudge another human their opinion. Seriously. You're absolutely welcome to have any opinion about any thing you want. However, I must warn you, if I think your opinion is stupid, I'm absolutely going to say so. I've recently stumbled on an article completely  brimming with so many idiotic opinions that I'm actually compelled to craft a response. Here's the gist of the original article: there are some horror movies out there that are so disturbing , you'll only ever want to watch them once. I've have taken her original list and refuted her claims without pulling her entire article over. You can read the original article here . Let's start at the beginning, with her opening statement

What Is Genre And Why Should I Care?

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

Contracted Or I Just Watched A Zombie Movie

Seems like horror fans fall into two buckets these days: zombie lovers and zombie haters. That dividing line just keeps getting deeper and darker the more zombies gain "mainstream popularity". I currently fall into the "I am so tired of zombies I could puke" bucket. I haven't stopped  watching zombie movies so much as I've started avoiding them at all costs, literally watching every other subgenre offering I stumble onto, regardless of how terrible it is. I seriously re-watched Wishmaster  this past week. That's how far out of my way I've been going to avoid the significant number of zombie movies flooding Netflix. Then I accidentally watched one. Contracted - 2013 I'm sure it was partially due to the really terrible movie synopsis that Netflix provided, which I'm prepared to admit that they may have nothing to do with and  that I likely didn't read it very well. In a strange twist of events, the movie cover actually helped