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Avengers have assembled! (pretty much just the Marvel movie thread now with some comics)
amateurhour
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This thread is here to discuss Marvel Comics
For those that don't know, Marvel Comics has been climbing like a rocket for the past three years. No longer wanting to be known as those guys who make those little books that nerds collect, they've expanded their empire to ginormous proportions.
First, about three years ago, they decided that they were tired of Fox and Sony royally fucking up their cherished franchises. They decided to take a step in the right direction and form Marvel Studios, a film company which they would use to produce feature films of their beloved comic characters with complete creative control (that's called alliteration kids, it's a comic book thing) without the suits standing in the way.
Their first outings were pretty damn successful. There was Iron Man, Then The Incredible Hulk, and Punisher: War Zone, which was their least profitable, but still better than anything Dolph Lundgren or Thomas Jane could ever cough out. Most recently, as in this week, they've signed master writer and director Joss Whedon to take the helm of their Avengers franchise. This will be a huge leap in the comic movie industry, as it will tie in all separate films while retaining most, if not all, of the principal cast.
Next, in a shocking move, Disney purchased Marvel for a pretty hefty sum. This caused a lot of stirrings in the comics industry and insiders from both sides of the field were "cautiously optimistic" to say the least.
Disney wasted no time in rattling the cages. Since taking ownership, they've made two strong moves. The first is to pull most of the off the shelf content and publication away from Diamond Comics, the ONLY printer and reseller of comic books (unless you're one of those indie books that sells less than 1000 copies a month) and turn it over to Hachette Press, a company with a long history of, well, history.
Second, they went all digital. That's the main thing I want to talk about. Two weeks ago, Marvel teamed up with ComiXology, a web/app based digital comics distribution controller, to provide an app for both the iPhone and the illustrious iPad.
Within this app, you can obtain Marvel comics, both free and paid, from an ever growing back catalogue. Now of course these look simply amazing on the ipad, but what's really amazing is how well they read on the iphone. They move panel to panel, auto adjusting for narrow or wide frames, with a unique and clever zoom feature that makes sure you can read all the text, and see every inch of the action in a film like storytelling format.
They've taken a lot of hell for their pricing, which currently stands at 1.99 a comic (USD) with no option for trade discounts or a season pass/subscription system. A blogger has written up a great view of this here
http://www.4thletter.net/2010/04/guest-post-andrew-bayer-on-digital-comics-pricing/
Basically, to summarize, he goes on to say that the $2 price point is a break even for Marvel Comics, while making sure the print industry doesn't suffer. As any collector knows, the entry point into comics, per issue, is around $3.50 currently, and back issues are getting more expensive every day. If Marvel released it's digital comics for, lets say $.99 a comic, there would be no reason to physically buy print comics anymore and they would lose money. By keeping the price at $2, they offer a very affordable alternative to the fan who isn't necessarily a collector, while making money and affording the cost of quality digital reprints with extensive formatting.
Okay, so the debate is this, are they groundbreaking and awesome, moving in a direction that will change the face of comics forever, or are they biting off more than they can chew, with an inevitable downfall to come?
Personally, I love the idea of the marvel online store. I love to collect, and have over 1000 comics currently bagged and boarded on my bookshelf, with dozens of accompanying hardcover and paperback trades, but it gets expensive, and I only collect because until now, it was my only legal means of acquiring comic books. I'm a huge fan of this new business model because it gives me the option to obtain entire runs of my favorite comics for pennies on the dollar compared to collecting the print format. For example, to obtain all 800 or so issues of Amazing Spider Man, starting with Amazing Fantasy 15, it would probably run me into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the quality of the comics. But for the low price of roughly $1600, I can obtain all of them on a redistributable, multi platform digital format that I can read forever.
So what say you D&D
Is this the future of comics, something we can look forward to for years and share with our precious offspring down the road?
Care to weigh in on mistakes you think they've made along the road (not counting Marvel 2099, of course)?
Discuss.
For those that don't know, Marvel Comics has been climbing like a rocket for the past three years. No longer wanting to be known as those guys who make those little books that nerds collect, they've expanded their empire to ginormous proportions.
First, about three years ago, they decided that they were tired of Fox and Sony royally fucking up their cherished franchises. They decided to take a step in the right direction and form Marvel Studios, a film company which they would use to produce feature films of their beloved comic characters with complete creative control (that's called alliteration kids, it's a comic book thing) without the suits standing in the way.
Their first outings were pretty damn successful. There was Iron Man, Then The Incredible Hulk, and Punisher: War Zone, which was their least profitable, but still better than anything Dolph Lundgren or Thomas Jane could ever cough out. Most recently, as in this week, they've signed master writer and director Joss Whedon to take the helm of their Avengers franchise. This will be a huge leap in the comic movie industry, as it will tie in all separate films while retaining most, if not all, of the principal cast.
Next, in a shocking move, Disney purchased Marvel for a pretty hefty sum. This caused a lot of stirrings in the comics industry and insiders from both sides of the field were "cautiously optimistic" to say the least.
Disney wasted no time in rattling the cages. Since taking ownership, they've made two strong moves. The first is to pull most of the off the shelf content and publication away from Diamond Comics, the ONLY printer and reseller of comic books (unless you're one of those indie books that sells less than 1000 copies a month) and turn it over to Hachette Press, a company with a long history of, well, history.
Second, they went all digital. That's the main thing I want to talk about. Two weeks ago, Marvel teamed up with ComiXology, a web/app based digital comics distribution controller, to provide an app for both the iPhone and the illustrious iPad.
Within this app, you can obtain Marvel comics, both free and paid, from an ever growing back catalogue. Now of course these look simply amazing on the ipad, but what's really amazing is how well they read on the iphone. They move panel to panel, auto adjusting for narrow or wide frames, with a unique and clever zoom feature that makes sure you can read all the text, and see every inch of the action in a film like storytelling format.
They've taken a lot of hell for their pricing, which currently stands at 1.99 a comic (USD) with no option for trade discounts or a season pass/subscription system. A blogger has written up a great view of this here
http://www.4thletter.net/2010/04/guest-post-andrew-bayer-on-digital-comics-pricing/
Basically, to summarize, he goes on to say that the $2 price point is a break even for Marvel Comics, while making sure the print industry doesn't suffer. As any collector knows, the entry point into comics, per issue, is around $3.50 currently, and back issues are getting more expensive every day. If Marvel released it's digital comics for, lets say $.99 a comic, there would be no reason to physically buy print comics anymore and they would lose money. By keeping the price at $2, they offer a very affordable alternative to the fan who isn't necessarily a collector, while making money and affording the cost of quality digital reprints with extensive formatting.
Okay, so the debate is this, are they groundbreaking and awesome, moving in a direction that will change the face of comics forever, or are they biting off more than they can chew, with an inevitable downfall to come?
Personally, I love the idea of the marvel online store. I love to collect, and have over 1000 comics currently bagged and boarded on my bookshelf, with dozens of accompanying hardcover and paperback trades, but it gets expensive, and I only collect because until now, it was my only legal means of acquiring comic books. I'm a huge fan of this new business model because it gives me the option to obtain entire runs of my favorite comics for pennies on the dollar compared to collecting the print format. For example, to obtain all 800 or so issues of Amazing Spider Man, starting with Amazing Fantasy 15, it would probably run me into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the quality of the comics. But for the low price of roughly $1600, I can obtain all of them on a redistributable, multi platform digital format that I can read forever.
So what say you D&D
Is this the future of comics, something we can look forward to for years and share with our precious offspring down the road?
Care to weigh in on mistakes you think they've made along the road (not counting Marvel 2099, of course)?
Discuss.
amateurhour on
This discussion has been closed.
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I don't mean on the iPhone or iPad or whatever, I'm sure that looks fine. But if you download an issue on the PC, they'll lose sharpness as soon as you go full screen.
Edit: Although, having just checked out a random issue, it's seems they've gotten a lot better.
I'm fairly sure that was still all Sony on that one.
I think the Ed Norton Hulk was Marvel Studios' first movie.
Spider Man 3 was all Sony. It was set in paper before Marvel Studios was formed
Iron Man was the first MS production, with IH following a few months later.
Also, I don't think the board meetings are necessarily an issue of "what can we make into a movie next?" because they don't need the specific stories. They have the core characters, and thousands of storylines to work with.
That's where the comic writers come into play. They can adapt the best of the stories into screenplays.
edit: I guess what I'm saying is that it will be a long time before we see any recent marvel characters in a movie.
Although, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, then Civil War, would make for a great three movie series.
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
I agree but when you say like Than did above that the comic books earned X and movies earned Y, I wonder how much of Y would have been in X if the movie makers and comic book makers were separate entities.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Both Hulk Vs. and Planet Hulk are incredible. And Spectacular Spider-man/Wolverine and the X-Men are arguably the best animated adaptations of their respective series.
Although things aren't looking great for Spectacular Spider-Man.
Honestly, I can't think of a single thing I want to desperately see onscreen at this point that isn't already in production.
Most of the stories from the golden age and silver age were hopelessly corny.
Really, DC has the only properties I want to see movement on right now. If we could get a decent Superman flick or an adaptation of Darwyn Cooke's Catwoman or New Frontier work, I'd be right as rain.
Or a Bone movie. But none of that is Marvel.
Punisher: Warzone was completely terrible. I mean, it went beyond so-terrible-it's-now-a-comedy terrible. In fact, I voted for it to be best comedy of the year.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
Yeah, but compare P:W, which is agreeably the worst marvel studios release, to Hulk (not incredible), The Punisher (travolta), or Daredevil (which I honestly loved, but that's me)
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
I would give my right eyetooth for a Nextwave movie.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Hey! I kinda liked Thomas Jane's Punisher. It was nice and gritty, still kinda human. Ang Lee's Hulk wasn't...terrible. Daredevil. Well, lets just say that Daredevil was much better as a Rifftrax.
That being said, the fear for a company like Marvel isn't that a shitty movie comes out. The fear is that some whack-job director at an outside studio is going to make a movie that isn't true to the characters they own and harm their brand. Sure, you can try and retain final control over the final cut, but there's always going to be the fear that some other studio is going to use a contractual loophole to take Captain America in a "new direction" and turn him into a gay coke-head in order to make the movie "edgy."
Maybe Punisher:War Zone sucked, but that was due to the usual reasons a movie sucks (bad script etc.) not because the Punisher in that movie wasn't really the Punisher.
Rigorous Scholarship
Now out of the DC universe the only decent movies have been some of the Batman movies and the original Superman movies, mainly Superman 2. And even in the Superman and Batman movies there were some horrible horrible horrible stinkers. But also the DC universe interests me less and the one Vertigo comic they did, Constantine, was so bad and so far from the source I think it gave me a stroke.
Hell, Batman almost got ruined as a franchise because Joel Schumacher had a "vision" of what Batman should be.
Rigorous Scholarship
Also, I think relying on movies for their primary form of revenue might be good for Marvel Comics in the long run. Like I said, comics are a low-margin industry; you're not making much more than you're putting into it. If that's your sole source of income, you have to be very careful about the risks you're taking.
However, if you're primarily using it for branding and market research, you can stop worrying so much about that, and become more willing to take on riskier projects, or develop more new products.
I quite enjoy keeping up with them and collecting them. I don't think print necessarily has to be the only distribution method, but I think it should stick around.
How recent are you talking about? A Deadpool movie is being made.
I 100% agree. Comics are a relatively cheap way of experimenting with IP franchises. Got a new character but not sure how the fans are going to react? Throw him in a one-shot.
With digital distribution, they've reduced the sunk publishing costs of franchise experiments to as low as you can possibly get them, reducing the risk of launching new IPs. Given that this is the biggest hurdle facing Hollywood right now, I see this as ultimately a good thing for fans. Hopefully they won't screw over creators in the meantime; if you're an artist or writer and your new character fails, well you didn't risk much. But if your new character succeeds and becomes the next Wolverine or Blade, is Disney just going to pocket the mountains of cash or are they going to appropriately toss some back and the people who designed the character in the first place?
Marvel learned their lesson well from the Image debacle in giving creators more credit (and royalties) but I don't know about Disney either way. Is Disney a good company for artists and writers to work for?
It sucks that a good majority of their major characters have to be seperated from the new universe.
Fuck Marvel.
That said the moves the company has made since being acquired by Disney do seem to make good business sense, and $1.99 is cheap enough for impulse buyers, but not enough to hurt the print industry, which is also good.
I've also noticed an increase in the quality of movies since they opened Marvel Studios and hope that the quality continues after Disney is able to start affecting the film franchises. Right now they have no say over the current movies in production and pre-production, per the agreement they signed with Marvel.
I do want to point out one thing. It doesn't necesarrily relate to Spider Man 3, but it factors into X3 and Daredevil and Hulk
Bruce Campbell talked about it in "If Chins Could Kill" I think. Either that or the one before. Basically though, you can take the production cost of a movie, what it costs to make from start to finish, and then double it. That's what a big budget movie costs with the fast food tie ins and commercials and advertising campaigns.
So when X3 cost roughly 140 million to make, it actually costs closer to 300 million. Okay. So it made $450 at the box office, so we'll consider that a net profit of $150 million. Now Fox is going to take the largest chunk of that, as they were the primary investors. It was a leased property from Marvel, so most of there money was up front, with a percentage of the gross on the back end.
I can't confirm the hard dollars on any of this, but my guess is that they don't start seeing real profit until the DVD sales hit, and these days most of that is set aside for the actors that don't have good enough agents to get first dollar gross percentages for their clients.
Again, I'm not saying Marvel didn't make money off of Fox and Sony, I'm just saying they're making a hell of a lot more now that it's in house, obviously.
But just because a movie does well at the box office, it doesn't mean that everyone gets rich.
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
I don't know that I would call the X-Men and Spider-Man the majority of their major characters.
Rigorous Scholarship
Yeah, you got me there.
But otherwise, there's not much going on with Marvel's undeveloped properties that I'm dying to see on the silver screen.
Remakes of already-ruined franchises? Maybe. I certainly could stand to see a competent Fantastic Four movie. And I certainly wouldn't hate quality expansions of the X-Men franchise.
But I'm just about tapped out with Marvel, at no fault to them. I just have no interest in seeing a Namor, Black Panther, Dr. Strange, Inhumans, X-Force, Vision, Cosmic Wars, or Clone Saga movie, or anything else from the silly past of Marvel's vaults.
DC, however, is largely untapped, even regarding their key franchises. There still hasn't been a single decent Superman adaptation, and other than Batman, Green Lantern is the only thing in the works as far as JLA members go. Yes, I know about Jonah Hex and look forward to it, but Marvel even after streamlining their productions, is churning successful films out at an amazing pace compared to Warners.
Why? How? Spectactular Spider-Man is probably the best cartoon of Spider-Man I've seen yet!
Steam Profile
While I agree, I'm pretty sure they got canceled.
It would have to stay true to its nihilistic R-ratedness.
I nominate David Gordon Green to direct.
If you missed it in the other thread, they announced yesterday that they're making an Ultimate Spiderman cartoon now to debut on SpecSpidey's old network so... yeah, it's pretty much 100% dead at this point.
Jason Segel (in shape) as the Captain
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Tabby
Gina Torres as Monica
Keira Knightly as Bloodstone
Demitri Martin as Aaron Stack
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
Jason Segel just feels a little more dirty
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
Runaways, too.
Well I mean there are a lot of Characters that fall under those properties that Marvel doesn't really own I think for movies. Such as rogue galleries and x-men 2nd string dudes.
Would it be wrong to say that Ryan Reynold's 15 minute screentime as Wade Wilson during that 15 minute segment where they go on their one mission together was the best part of the movie? Because that's how I feel.
Everything after that point is just...just...awful.
I think for me the worst part of that movie is when Wolverine is fighting Gambit for pretty much no reason, when Gambit climbs up the wall with his broken stick, then jumps onto the fire escape. Wolverine goes to the base and begins to knock it down by slashing it with his claws, which COMPLETELY VAPORIZE the fire escape each time he hits it!
Just...ARGH!
hell if adamantium touches itself it explodes and repels (like when wolvie lightly touched his claws together and it exploded in a shower of sparks and repelled his hands back)
they need to dial that shit back some
especially if they're gonna want to have magneto rip the adamantium out of wolverine at some point
Haha yeah, I actually laughed out loud when I saw that bathroom scene. Fucking corny.
Yeah, that movie was crap.
I really liked the scene you're talking about, and if that's how they're going to do Deadpool in his solo movie, I'd be happy with it.