You can already hear the grumblings in the true geek community at large; it is starting with Spider-Man being used as a pimp in Fedex commercials and branding on their packaging materials, and even some of the X-Men characters being whored out to fast-food franchise marketing. The hey-day of comic media bubble expansion is about to abruptly come to a close with a big pop. Well that's my prediction anyways.
Regardless of all of that, the movie was welcomed with a $114 million opening weekend. That was a huge opening weekend for a comic book based movie. So what did studios start doing? They tried cashing in on that concept. That led to the release of a subpar Hulk, directed by Ang Lee, a year later, with a much weaker $62 million opening weekend.
Are you seeing the early trend there? Comic-based movies were spread out, a year apart from one another. There were spaces in time between movies so that everyone had the time and more importantly the desire to see all of them because they were, for the most part, good.
And now studios are producing so many movies, that they are having a hard time not scheduling their releases on the same weekends of the same year. This my friends is called, oversaturation of a market.
In 2014 alone, we are slated to have 14 movies based on comics coming out, 15 if you want to count the Hobbit which technically isn't based on comics, but definitely falls within the geekdom of Cosplay. If you were to add to that count movies that were based on videogames the count skyrockets to 18+ movies. Here is a partial list...
- Legend of Hercules
- I, Frankenstein
- Lego Movie
- 300
- Captain America
- Spider-Man
- X-Men
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Hercules
- Transformers
- Guardians
- TMNT
- Sin City
- Big Hero 6
- The Hobbit
To top all of this theatre saturation, more than one movie a month, comics are moving to saturate the television as well. Here is a list, not to be considered definitive by any means, of the movies and television shows that are either already on, or under some form of development as I write this.
TV Shows
Netflix
Daredevil (Marvel)
Jessica Jones(Marvel)
Iron Fist (Marvel)
Luke Cage (Marvel)
These four Netflix shows will culminate in a team-up mini-series called;
The Defenders (Marvel)
That's four comic based shows and a planned movie just on Netflix. Talk about bingeing.
NBC
Constantine (DC)
CW
iZombie (Vertigo)
The Flash (DC)
Hourman (DC)
PSN
Powers (Wizard)
ABC
Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.(Marvel)
Agent Carter (Marvel)
WGN America
Scalped (Vertigo)
Fox
Arrow (DC)
Gotham (DC)
AMC
Walking Dead (Image)
Comic Book Men (Kevin Smith)
Preacher (Vertigo)
Movies In Development
Man of Steel 2 (DC)
Justice League (DC)
Wonder Woman (DC)
Metal Men (DC)
Shazam (DC)
Fantastic 4 (Marvel)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Marvel)
Ant-Man (Marvel)
Captain America 3
Thor 3
Doctor Strange
Sandman (Vertigo)
100 Bullets (Vertigo)
Fables (Vertigo)
Movies that have stalled
Green Lantern (DC)
Justice League Dark (DC)
Black Panther
The Inhumans
Y The Last Man (Vertigo)
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I chose to compare this comic boom to the dot-com bubble of the 90s for a reason; it truly is a comparable growth and decline model based solely on supply and demand.
In 1997 the growth of dot-coms began to rise as people learned that there was money to be made on the internet, and not just from porn. From this growth came companies like Amazon, eBay, Priceline, etc. What else came were thousands of sites clambering for little piece of the pie. To support the resulting infrastructure growth, servers, network hardware, memory and disks were ordered at records rates. Manufacturing companies hired record numbers of employees. By 2000 IBM, Dell, and HP were posting record sales numbers. But the economy wouldn't sustain it.
The same thing is happening in comic book media. I believe we are at the year 2000 in the time dot-comic version of the dot-com timeline. I'm afraid that we have about three to six years, maybe less, of this comic-bubble left before it bursts. It simply just can't sustain this level of saturation for long.
Human beings, comic geeks not included, typically get bored, real fast, especially with repetition. I excluded comic geeks because many of us have been collecting since we were young and here we are today, many focused on one character the whole time.
But most human beings, you know, the 140 character communicating human beings of today with their 3 status updates per day average (I know a few people who are way above average on that front), want something shiny and new almost all of the time. And right now that happens to be comics in every media-format we can get it in. Geek culture is in right now. This is why you can Marvel branded t-shirts at Walmart for $4.98. Ten years ago it was vampires. Five years ago it was zombies (which happens to be hitting it's own bubble-bursting moment). Tomorrow it will be something else. This is how we are wired; we don't like to be bored.
I'm not going to predict when or how exactly it's going to fail, but here will be a few of the possible signs of a coming bubble pop.
- Some comic-based T.V. shows get cancelled due to lack of viewership
- Comic based movies start performing poorly at the box office, especially previously popular ones
- Big name stars stop signing up for comic-based projects not wanting the failure listed on their career
- A comic-based movie totally bombs at the box office
- Direct to Blu Ray comic based movie releases
- Studios begin withdrawing from comic-based projects they have committed to, cancelling productions, etc
- A void will remain
Horror movies go through cycle this all the time and it does happen in cycles. After years of decline in the horror genre, somebody makes a low budget movie called Saw and makes a fortune, so studios began releasing tons of torture flicks like Hostel, The Strangers and rebooting Texas Chainsaw, Hills have Eyes and I Spit on Your Grave. People can't seem to get enough of it, until they do, then it dies out again. Once it looks profitable again studios will start churning them out like nobodies business.
Once a collapse happens, it will take some time, but someone will have the balls to stand up and make something fresh, and comics will return to the big screen and the cycle will start all over again. Maybe next time the heroes won't be so damaged and broody, who knows.
For the time being, enjoy the ride while it is still going. Buy the Blu Rays when they come out, so when collapse happens you can relive the glory of the first twenty years of the 2000s.
Until next time... Take a deep breath while the bubble still has air
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