Month: September 2016

I’ve been a HUGE fan of comic book movies since I can remember.  Superman: The Movie was one of my first real comic-book movies that I saw, and I was totally entranced.  Tim Burton’s Batman was another fantastic film that really did justice to the character.  These were and still are truly great movies.  But after the release of Batman And Robin, the film industry and audiences pretty much turned away from the genre for a number of years until the X-Men movie was released back in 2000.  While we did see a number of fantastic movies based on comics like The Crow and Blade, people really didn’t take comic books or the movies based on them all that serious until 2000.  When X-Men came out, people really started to take notice of these movies again.  We had entered into a new age of comic book-based cinema.  While X-Men got really popular, Marvel Studios really kicked things off with Iron Man in 2008.  This was the movie that kick-started the MCU, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  During the decade that followed, Marvel had established characters like Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man in movies that were interconnected.  While some films were not nearly as good as others, the overall quality of the movies that were released was high.  People and critics responded quite well.  Soooooo….what did DC have that matched?  NOTHING.  They had Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, which was a trilogy of phenomenal films, but didn’t connect with anything else that DC was doing at the time.

It wasn’t until Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, that DC and Warner Bros. decided to have a go with their own universe of comic book heroes.  While I loved the hell out of Man of Steel, it was not necessarily the film that a lot of people were expecting.  It did really well, so a follow-up film was inevitable.  People who loved Man of Steel were really looking forward to a Man of Steel 2.  HOWEVER, Warner Bros. had a different plan.  See, when The Avengers came out in 2012, the dynamic of comic book movies changed.  Marvel and Paramount/Disney had given us our first real superhero ensemble film.  It blew everybody’s minds.  It was awesome.  So…to try and compete, DC Comics/Warner Bros. decided to step in the ring with Man of Steel.  But it wasn’t until some time later that they decided to go for an ensemble movie of their own with Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  This was NOT the movie that people were expecting.  They were expecting another solo Superman film.  They’ll get another one, alright.  Just not for a while.  Anyways, I digress.  Batman V. Superman was supposed to be the real jumping off point for what is now known as the DC Expanded Universe or DCEU for short.  The film was not particularly well-received.  I liked it well enough, but it was loaded with problems.  You can read my review by hitting the Reviews tab at the top.  Warner Bros. was expecting the film to hit the 1 billion dollar mark, and when it only reached 800 million, they were disappointed.  Really?  $800 million is not chump change for a movie like that.  Critically, it got wasted, so an extended version was released on Blu-Ray that fixed a majority of problems.  People were excited when Wonder Woman stepped on screen for the first time in a live-action film.  Gal Gadot knocked it out of the park.  But that still doesn’t address where DC stands when it comes to comic book movies.

DC has a number of films lined up like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, The Green Lantern Corps, and the big enchilada: Justice League.  Unfortunately, DC was about a decade late to the party.  See, Marvel Studios already had an established world with THIRTEEN movies released, and DC’s Expanded Universe currently only has three which includes Suicide Squad.  I realize that DC and Marvel are the two top competing comic book companies in the world, but Marvel is coming out ahead in terms of the live-action film arena.  DC has fantastic animated movies, so they aren’t slouches there.  For the foreseeable future, though, Marvel has the upper hand.  They did it first and they did it well.  DC’s playing catch-up and they aren’t doing a very good job of it at all.  It’s a shame, because I am looking forward to seeing the stuff that comes out of DC over the next couple of years.

With Captain America: Civil War, Marvel has pretty established their dominance in the live-action comic book movie arena.  They keep upping the ante in terms of story, character development and action.  DC’s got some really cool stuff coming down the pipe, but a lot of people are wondering if it’s a case of “too little, too late.”  I could be wrong, and DC might knock it out of the park with Justice League.  It’s entirely possible.  But if DC and Warner Bros. don’t start getting it right with movies like Wonder Woman, they are going to be faced with a situation that could spell doom for the entire DCEU.  I don’t want that to happen.  Most comic book movie fans don’t want that to happen.  But if DC doesn’t start paying attention to what they’re doing instead of trying to ape the competition, it could be disastrous for everybody involved.

Over the next couple of days,  I will be discussing my favorite movies from each company.  With Marvel, I will be including films from other companies that use Marvel characters.  So, stay tuned for that and I will talk you later.

The topic of movie piracy has been debated for decades.  You’ve got people on one side saying it’s not doing any harm to the movie industry, while you’ve got folks IN the film industry saying that piracy is costing them money.  To an extent, piracy does affect the film industry.  Certain parts of the industry are getting hit harder than others.  Big blockbuster movies like Star Wars and Jurassic World aren’t likely to be dramatically affected by people downloading a copy here and there, do to the films’ enormous budgets.  I’m not necessarily worried about the big guys.  It’s the smaller and more independent film-makers that I’m concerned about.  Now, last night on Facebook, I was a part of a conversation with someone on the page of Scott Adkins.  Scott Adkins, if you don’t know, is a British martial arts actor/stunt-man who is well-known in the independent film scene.  He’s had some surprising success with films like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, Undisputed III, and Close Range.  Pretty down-to-earth guy, actually.  Anyway, he posted an article about piracy and how detrimental it is to the film industry.  There are a great number of people who have basically come out in support of piracy on HIS page.  One of the arguments I read was trying to compare the theft of DVDs/Blu-Rays to multi-million dollar vehicles.  That argument doesn’t hold water, because theft is theft, no matter how expensive the object is.

The people on that page have basically said, “if you stop making crappy movies, we’ll stop pirating them.”  Here’s the problem with that whole deal:  The reason the quality of movies is going down, is because the studios aren’t willing to make a significant investment in the event they won’t see a return.  It’s simple economics.  If you invest in something, you would expect to get something out of it, right?  Piracy puts a rather massive dent in that investment.  Again, for the movies that have 100+ million dollars in their budget, I’m not overly concerned with, because half the time they end up making that money back eventually with home video releases and through other means.  It’s the independent film studios that get hit the hardest.  The most money that these guys can put towards making a movie is usually less than 10 million.  That’s a drop in the bucket when compared to the big guys, but it also means that the indie guys have to work harder in order to get their films done and out the door, which usually ends up going almost straight to video.  Not many movie theaters are going to risk playing a small independent movie when more money could be made by featuring a bigger movie.  Independent film-makers have to depend on audiences either renting or buying their films in order to make a living.  The residuals from those sales go back to the studio so they can help pay for the film.  I’ve talked about how complicated it is to make a movie, regardless of its size.  It’s not a cheap endeavor.  There’s a lot of overhead, and sometimes a lot of these film studios, even the big ones, don’t actually make a profit from their movies.  Pirates don’t think about that, they only care about getting the film now and not having to pay for it.

Piracy, at least in the States, is about a 20 billion dollar industry.  That’s not an insignificant chunk of change.  Studios have gone after groups like The Pirate Bay and several torrent sites, and even gone after individuals for severe copyright violations.  While the overall industry might not necessarily by overly negatively affected, the smaller studios and films are definitely going to feel the pinch.  Piracy is theft in every sense of the word.  It’s illegal and unethical.  You’re taking a product that somebody has worked hard to produce and you’re not paying a single dime for it.  People will argue that “oh, well, I was never going to pay to see that movie, anyway.”  And that gives you the right to break the law….how?  There’s also the excuse that pirating a movie gives it more exposure.  Maybe, but how do the film-makers benefit from that?  They don’t see the money from that particular copy, and when you pile on the amount of copies that are being uploaded to the Internet on a daily basis, that number adds up.  It’s not an insignificant number and it really hurts the smaller guys.  The big guys?  Not nearly as much, but they will still feel it.  Honestly, I don’t care what your “moral” justifications are for stealing somebody’s movie, it’s wrong.  “Oh, it’s too expensive.”  Save up your money and buy it later, or better yet, rent it.  There’s nothing here that I’m going to say or do that’s going to stop people from pirating movies.  That’s being unrealistic.  But I really do hope that people realize that pirating movies can hurt people.  It’s NOT a victimless crime as some people would have you believe.