Random Thought Of The Day #715

Day 715

Re-watching the Avengers last night, it dawned on me. Look at the other superhero movies that have been done and look at that one. The rest have all be grounded in some form of reality. The idea of a guy or girl in a brightly colored spandex pervert suit running around and punching people in the face and flying and shooting laser beams out of his ass was too fantastical for the audience. At least that always seemed to be the thoughts of studio heads.

Avengers just said "fuck it, we're making a comic book right into a movie. We're making it in a way that we can't make it in a comic book and we're going to make it look fucking huge."

And you know what happened? About 1.5 billion dollars worth of things. A man in an exosuit that can fly? A norse god? A gigantic green rage monster Jeckyl & Hyde analogue? A walking American Flag? All in one movie?

Jesus, they couldn't even let GI Joe have as much of a leatherman fetish fantasy on screen that it did as a cartoon. They had to dress everyone the same (except Snake Eyes. Because you can't fuck with Snake Eyes) and wear these stupid battle armor suits. There was none of the individuality that made the cartoon and toys fucking awesome.

They couldn't even make Transformers look that distinct other than the 1/3 of them that was painted car colors. How many times could you not figure out who was fighting who in any of the Transformers movies?

But Avengers? They just said "we're going to do everything that people love about the comic book and put that right on a big screen with humans wearing those costumes"... and the general public fucking LOVED it.

Batman had to be grounded in reality. The X-Men had to all wear black leather jumpsuits. Because costumes would have been too "out there" for the general public. At least they finally got that right in First Class, but still... 3 movies of black leather catsuits for people was cool at the time. And then you saw Avengers. You saw how fantastical you could make the costumes and still make it WORK. There wasn't just suspension of disbelief, there was downright dismissal of disbelief.

I don't think people quite realize how ballsy Marvel had to be to make that movie the way they did. If  you would have approached a studio in 1995 with that same idea, they'd throw you out of the office laughing and say the moviegoing audience would never believe it.

If you would have said "I want to make 5 movies to set up a 6th big movie and 4 out of those 5 would have totally different characters in them with nothing more than some ancillary character that kinda shows up for a second or 3 that will connect them. And then I want them to be totally disparate in tone and genre. But the 6th movie will throw them all together into the same movie and then have them team-up to fight aliens and the villian from 1 of those other 5 movies. And we want to have them all released in less than 4 years." ... you know what anyone would have said?  They would have said "you're fucking high" and laughed you out of the room.

And if you had told them you wanted a billion dollars to do them all on? You would have bene put in a straight jacket.

But when you do it... and you make almost 4 billion dollars in box office revenue, that's a fucking achievement.

Nobody has really ever been able to think that BIG in hollywood before now. They always thinking about spinning OFF. They never think about spinning IN. That's what Avengers did. It spun IN 4 different franchises into 1 and then blew the doors off the record books in both quality AND dollars.

To that, I tip my hat. Well played, Marvel. Well played.

Meanwhile, DC and Warner Brothers are sitting there trying to figure out how to do a superhero movie that doesn't have a flying rodent as the star and make it not suck. And IMO, even the 3rd one of those sucked. We'll see how Man of Steel turns out, but even then, they have no coherent plan on how to build to a Justice League of America movie the way Marvel built to Avengers.

Somewhere though, a WB studios exec is getting his balls cut off in a back room of a Thai opium den for letting Joss Whedon go and not letting him make the Wonder Woman movie he wanted to.