What if this Superhero film boom we have seen, which began with "X-Men" in 2000, began a decade earlier.
The late 80s and into the 90s were a period where the comic nerd long awaited many promised projects. In 1989, Batman had made a major splash, and was now a franchise going strong, and perhaps, it seemed, it could have signaled many other projects would gain ground. That didn't really happen. Projects like a Spiderman movie and a film based on the character Lobo never happened, along with a multitude of other rumored projects, and some of them may have just been rumors. Films were did received weren't that great: The Punisher and Captain America were poorly received (I've seen the latter, and it is not a great film, and randomly changes the Red Skull to being an Italian Fascist instead of a Nazis), and the Fantastic Four movie was just a way for the film studio to keep the rights to that intellectual property and it was never intended for release (and it was a terrible film anyway). The Superman reboot/sequel concept was hamstrung when Christopher Reeve was crippled, and over the 90s it evolved into a planned project where Nic Cage would play Superman and he would fight Brainiac, and that concept took on things like Superman not wearing a costume or him wearing a costume but a black one or something somehow '90s and having a dog that could talk, and fighting a giant mechanical spider-robot, and a litany of other things that would be the thought behind making "Batman and Robin" and would have made that Superman the same schlock type as "Batman and Robin". Kevin Smith talks about it here. And of course the Batman franchise, that great beginner of a potential great age, self destructed. It began when they took out Tim Burton, and replaced him with Joel Schumacher, and things became campier and less serious and less good beginning with "Batman Forever" and culminating in "Batman and Robin" which was a toy commercial that was absolutely terrible and like the black box of a soulless corporate studio system in the crash of a franchise. That left the superhero genre looking dead for a while until X-Men proved it was bankable, and showed it could be done right if they put in the effort, and maybe after the failure of Batman they were ready to take it seriously (superhero films became maybe even like video game films before that; no/incompetent effort, badly done, but they know you'll go to it so who cares).
But what if, like X-Men in 2000, Batman in 1989 (or perhaps something else around the late 80s) began a superhero film boom earlier, and it began the studios to produce comic superhero films? Hell, it may not even be good films; it may just be a bunch of films like the schlock we saw like "Captain America" (1990) and even "Batman and Robin", but I'd like to explore this idea even if the logistics of the movie studio relationship with comic books and comic book films in this era will force it to be that.
The late 80s and into the 90s were a period where the comic nerd long awaited many promised projects. In 1989, Batman had made a major splash, and was now a franchise going strong, and perhaps, it seemed, it could have signaled many other projects would gain ground. That didn't really happen. Projects like a Spiderman movie and a film based on the character Lobo never happened, along with a multitude of other rumored projects, and some of them may have just been rumors. Films were did received weren't that great: The Punisher and Captain America were poorly received (I've seen the latter, and it is not a great film, and randomly changes the Red Skull to being an Italian Fascist instead of a Nazis), and the Fantastic Four movie was just a way for the film studio to keep the rights to that intellectual property and it was never intended for release (and it was a terrible film anyway). The Superman reboot/sequel concept was hamstrung when Christopher Reeve was crippled, and over the 90s it evolved into a planned project where Nic Cage would play Superman and he would fight Brainiac, and that concept took on things like Superman not wearing a costume or him wearing a costume but a black one or something somehow '90s and having a dog that could talk, and fighting a giant mechanical spider-robot, and a litany of other things that would be the thought behind making "Batman and Robin" and would have made that Superman the same schlock type as "Batman and Robin". Kevin Smith talks about it here. And of course the Batman franchise, that great beginner of a potential great age, self destructed. It began when they took out Tim Burton, and replaced him with Joel Schumacher, and things became campier and less serious and less good beginning with "Batman Forever" and culminating in "Batman and Robin" which was a toy commercial that was absolutely terrible and like the black box of a soulless corporate studio system in the crash of a franchise. That left the superhero genre looking dead for a while until X-Men proved it was bankable, and showed it could be done right if they put in the effort, and maybe after the failure of Batman they were ready to take it seriously (superhero films became maybe even like video game films before that; no/incompetent effort, badly done, but they know you'll go to it so who cares).
But what if, like X-Men in 2000, Batman in 1989 (or perhaps something else around the late 80s) began a superhero film boom earlier, and it began the studios to produce comic superhero films? Hell, it may not even be good films; it may just be a bunch of films like the schlock we saw like "Captain America" (1990) and even "Batman and Robin", but I'd like to explore this idea even if the logistics of the movie studio relationship with comic books and comic book films in this era will force it to be that.
