Statista wrote another superficial look at the collapse of superhero film fare that refuses to address whether the films in question could be woke:
According to The Numbers, adaptations of comic books and graphic novels accounted for just 15.6 and 3.2 percent of ticket sales at the North American box office in 2023 and 2024, down from 29.9 and 31.0 percent in 2021 and 2022, respectively. While some argue that this is due to “superhero fatigue” after a decade-long overabundance of DC and Marvel movies, others say it’s just “mediocre movie fatigue”, suggesting that many of the latest installments of popular comic book franchises have been lazy cash grabs.
This year’s box office performance of major comic book adaptations such as “Superman” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” would suggest that audiences are still open to enjoying a good superhero blockbuster. Both movies received generally positive reviews and are among the highest-grossing films of the year so far.
On the surface, they may seem as high grossing as can get, but the problem is that today, when film and marketing budgets are so staggeringly expensive, it’s not always enough to recoup the heavy costs. And again, nobody in the mainstream’s willing to discuss in depth whether wokery and even performers who make divisive political statements have responsibility for whatever financial damage the film’s suffer. Has anybody discussed whether they believe the sex-swap for the Silver Surfer plausible enough for the Fantastic Four film or not? Or whether the political statements of its star, Pedro Pascal, cost First Steps heavily? Or whether the Superman movie suffered similar problems in-film? If not, then one can’t be surprised it all went south quickly.
Sure, the mediocrity itself was a damaging factor, but that’s based on the wokeness that overtook much of moviedom over the past decade, and plenty of movies fumbled as a result. Yet the news site won’t acknowledge any of that either, so they can’t be surprised if there’ll be quite a few more films coming up soon that suffer similar problems.
Originally published here
Avi Green
Avi Green was born in Pennsylvania, and moved to Israel at the age of 9. His first comic was the Fantastic Four. He considers himself a conservative-style version of Clark Kent, and his blog the Four Color Media Monitor is where he says "if we're going to try and stop the misuse of our favorite comics and their protagonists by the companies that write and publish them, we've got to see what both the printed and online comics news is doing wrong." His blog focuses on both the good and the bad, the newspaper media and the online websites. Unabashedly. Unapologetically. Scanning the media for what's being done right and what's being done wrong. Follow him on X @AviGreen1
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