With the steady growth of comic books being made into films in the last decade, some doing better than others, there have been plenty studio folks and fans that have been predicting the bubble bursting any minute now. While we used to see certain genres in various media lasting for many years, decades even, everything moves at a faster clip now since there’s always something new on the horizon. With the man behind Marvel Studios being asked the question about how well comic book films can do in the long term, he brings this to light.
“If it is a fad, it’s one that lasts 30 to 40 years, as the Western did,” Feige says, “because each one is so different. There’s an opportunity to graft almost sub-genres onto them. Our first Captain America film was a World War II picture, and the next is a political thriller. They all have their own textures and patinas, and that’s what is exciting about it.”
With the first film being a World War II film in so many ways, it’s a natural progression to look at this feature in that light since it’ll be in the present, an arguably smaller and tighter cast overall and certainly not the kind of light moments that made up a good portion of that film as it tried to bring that sense of the 40’s movie/comic book making out in the story. It’s also easy to see that as Marvel goes forward, their films are going to get more diverse even while still under the “comic book movie” moniker by many. With a big science fiction film going into production with Guardians of the Galaxy, the fantasy styled Thor: The Dark World, plans for Ant-man which are sounding like they’ll be more humorous/action/adventure styled and the potential for a magic based film with Doctor Strange, the comic book movies can’t be pigeonholed the same way some other genres can, mostly because comics play in so many genres. And if Feige and the others are Marvel Studios manage to sway moviegoers with more branches of the comics universe they’ve built, they’ll certainly have a long, healthy and varied life.
[Source: Variety]
