PastPoop

6/17/2003-But Seriously.......

Friday, June 20th 2003 is a day I have waited for since I was 4 years old. At last, my favorite comic book character gets his own movie and it looks to be done pretty damn well. Following closely on the heels of X2: X-Men United and Spider-Man, Hulk has a lot to live up to. The recent boom of Marvel comics being ported to the silver screen with huge budgets and big name actors is a good thing for geek fanboys like me. It's been a gamble that has paid off since 1998 with the first Blade film. So far out of six recently released big budget Marvel films, only one has sucked and that was Daredevil. However, was Daredevil an omen of things to come?

Hollywood has fully embraced Marvel porting their books to film, however if history is any teacher trends will find a decline. Enevietably the market will soon be a sponge of saturation that will become a bad taste to consumers, and even further, stupid scripts will be okayed for film merely to cash in on the trend. Marvel denies this, but they have no less than 17(!) projects in one stage of development or another. There has to be some stinkers in there somewhere, I just hope the Hulk isn't one of them....

Marvel isn't the only comic company being courted to make some more cinematic goodness. Truthfully DC comics has had much better success in earlier days with the Superman and first two Batman films. However, they sank with the stinky 1995 release Batman Forever, followed by an even worse Batman and Robin in 1997. Tim Burton did the first Batman films, and Joel Schmuck-maker, I mean Schumaker (8MM and some other movies, can't remember right now) handled Batman's film demise, but I recently learned there are 3 Bat-flicks in development. Why? Because comic movies are bank these days. Superman is destined to return, and other DC titles are scheduled for production...Hawkman, Green Lantern, and even Jack Kirby's lamest creation The Demon. At least they're doing Hellboy, but we'll see how that turns out.

Indie and smaller publishers are getting a bite too. I've heard of a forthcoming Lady Death and Evil Ernie movie (these titles are from Top Cow Productions) as well as Fathom, Witchblade, (why? the show was poo, movie is a bad idea.) and even get this.... a Flaming Carrot movie. It's doubtful all of these will see the light of day, but someone is working on these right now. I also forgot to mention another Spawn flick, but Image, Spawn's publisher, is not exactly a small company anymore, but yeah he gets another stab at flickdom too.

While I am excited about this, I am wary. I remember in the early 90's people making fun of me for being a comic collector and Transformers fan. Back in the early 90's as well, there was a surge of bad Marvel direct to video movies; Captain America, The Punisher, even those awful Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Hulk made for tv movies.They were terrible, misguided, and saw little success, except for the Hulk movies only because the show was so misguidedly beloved.. Now comic movies are justifiably all the rage, and could very well enter a pewpy decline that results in them becoming a joke for VH-1's "I Love the 00's" twenty years from now. I don't want to see that happen. My point here is merely for the comic companies to truly put quality before quantity. Don't cash in on the trend, let geeks like me look back on these years and be happy our childhood ascended in culture but didn't become a cultural joke due to bad property handling and lowest common denominator franchise pimping. Make the fans happy while expanding to the masses, but not at the expense of the character.

-Insidious_T