Four Color Comics

Marvel Entertainment, publishers of some of my favorite comic books from childhood, has concluded a financing deal that grants the company a $525 million line of credit to make up to ten films based on its properties. From a MSN article:

The move comes amid Marvel’s struggle with weakening sales. In the latest second quarter, the company posted an eleven percent drop in profit, hurt by sharply lower licensing and toy sales amid waning demand for merchandise from last summer’s Spider-Man 2 movie. Marvel said the ten characters in the arrangement are Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, and Shang-Chi. Each film is expected to have a budget of up to $165 million dollars and a rating no more restrictive than PG-13. Although the financing allows for the production of animated films, Marvel currently intends to use the funds to make only live-action films.

Most people don’t care: comic books are kids stuff. I’ve spent my entire life reading comics, though, so I do care, if only a little bit. (In general, I’m not fond of superhero films.)

The real problem with this deal is that Marvel vastly overestimates the public’s interest in superheroes and in superhero movies. I know that my wife will have no interest in seeing any film based on these characters. I suspect that most women will agree with her. Hell, I’m a lifelong comic book reader and even I only have interest in films based on two of these characters: Captain America and Dr. Strange.

Captain America, created in 1941, is just what you’d expect: a star-spangled supersoldier (inexplicably carrying a giant round shield) who mostly fights Nazis. His biggest enemy is — brace yourself — the Red Skull, a sort of super-Nazi. It’s cheesy, yes, but if a film were set during World War Two, it might be fun in an Indiana Jones kind of way.

Dr. Strange isn’t really a superhero. He’s a mystic. He’s a sorcerer who travels through space and time by means of the astral plane. In the stories I’ve read, he mostly does a lot of spying. He enters a meditative trance and his astral form leaves his physical body to spy on evil-doers across the city. Then Dr. Strange calls the cops. His arch-nemesis is the dread Dorammu. Again, it doesn’t sound too exciting, but it might play well if the right creative people put it together.

The other characters available for films? They’re enough to make a man weep. Some might be translated into mediocre films, but others suck in comic form, and they’re just going to suck more in film form. Hawkeye? Hawkeye is lame! He’s Aquaman-lame:

Hawkeye has trained himself to become an expert archer with near-perfect accuracy. He practices a minimum of two hours per day to keep his skills honed. He has also had extensive training as an aerialist and acrobat, and personal tutoring by Captain America in hand-to-hand combat. Hawkeye possesses vary keen eyesight and exceptional reflexes. Hawkeye is 80% deaf in both ears, due to an incident, and wears specially-designed miniature hearing aids. Hawkeye wields a number of custom-made bows, and carries a quiver containing various gadget-laden “trick” arrows.

(I like the “trick” in quotation marks.)

I think Ant-Man is dumb; I can’t possibly imagine how they’ll make a film based around him. What’s he going to do? Fight off an invasion of locusts?

For years, Marvel has struggled to maintain its financial footing. I’m not an industry expert, and I don’t actually buy that many comic books anymore, but from my perspective, the problems with the company are that (a) they’ve always had a pathological need for growth and (b) they refuse to remain focused on what they’re about, which is comic books.

Now, if they’d make a film based on Powers, I’d be all over that.

(For the record, this rant was originally posted to my personal weblog last fall. I’m reposting it now because I am planning another entry about Marvel comics films.Here’s the slashdot post that inspired this rant, and here’s my metafilter post about the subject.)