What's Next For Superhero Movies? 396
New submitter Faizdog writes "The Atlantic has a very interesting article on what's next for superhero movies after The Dark Knight Rises leaves theaters. DC in particular doesn't seem to have a good pipeline of readily available heroes to create movies around. The article discusses the challenges surrounding the upcoming Man of Steel movie, as well as how the circumstances around the successful Spiderman reboot may not necessarily translate to a Batman reboot. The author also mentions the necessity and viability of the comic book print medium continuing on in light of the film successes, especially in terms of revenue (the Avengers movie alone made more profit for Marvel than all comic book sales for the last two years). The article concludes with an interesting suggestion that television may be the ideal medium for comic book adaptations, as it may permit a richer and more complex story telling experience than a two-hour movie."
Marvel's on it (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Cinematic_Universe [wikipedia.org]
And I'm not even a comic fan. Who was this article written for?
Re:Akira reboot? (Score:5, Informative)
Ohhoho, hoho, no.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-actual-live-action-akira-script-worse-than-you-think/ [cracked.com]
Re:write a new story? (Score:4, Informative)
They mentioned that a bit, in the Avengers movie, with Iron Man using his Arc Reactor tech to provide 100% clean power Stark Tower. That's just the prototype though. It becomes a plot point later on, when Nick Fury talks about using the Tesseract to produce energy. Tony knows it's BS because "I'm pretty much the only name in clean energy right now." Basically saying that if they WERE just after clean energy for the world, they would have contacted him.
Also, in order to make a battalion of Iron Men (Iron Mans?) Tony would have to stop tinkering with it long enough to mass produce the thing. In just 3 movies, he's been through 7 different variants of the Armor, not counting War Machine
Mark I : The big ugly original ... just a hunch
Mark II : First "real" iron man armor with flight. Eventually stolen to make War Machine.
Mark III : Red/Gold suit that fixed the icing issue and added weapons.
Mark IV : Didn't get a lot of screen time, but it's the first one with a completely removable helmet (him sitting in the donut) and there was an "awating upgrades" sign on it earlier. Also allows for a REAL suit to be worn underneath, instead of the jumpsuit
Mark V : Suitcase Armor!
Mark VI : New element for power, triangle chest window, laser wrist (one-time use)
Mark VII : Wrist-band deploying system, extra boosters on the shoulders so he can fly and shoot repulsors at the same time. Extra ammo backpack. Better wrist laser weapons.
Next up, he'll probably add something to help him survive in space with it
And once he finally settles on a design, he's going to have to train a battalion of people to use them... and lets not forget cost. Tony's rich an all, but how much does each one of those suits cost, and how much is reused between variants? Is it even feasible to produce 400+ of them?
Not sure if I understand your last point, about science... especially in a post where you reference Avengers. A movie with several very nice scientists genuinely doing good deeds to benefit mankind (except the one who got mind controlled by an evil demi-god, but hey) Remember Tony's clean energy thing I mentioned earlier? How about Bruce Banner playing doctor in Calcutta, trying to cure some unnamed but rampant disease. Then, upon being recruited, putting his knowledge toward helping find the bad guy. No world domination schemes, and quite specific instructions that he's *ONLY* there to help locate the MacGuffin and nothing else. Before Dr. Selvig got turned into Loki's personal flying monkey ("Hey, I get that reference!!") he was just studying stars and other stellar phenomenon. Nothing evil or immoral there.