Jeff Ayers gets them all the time: movie executives, casually strolling the aisles of Forbidden Planet, the Union Square-area comic-book superstore in Manhattan. Inevitably, they find their way to Ayers, the assistant manager — and they always have the same question.
"They're looking for the next hot property," Ayers says.
And with good reason: Comic-book movies have been a box-office bonanza this year, starting with "Daredevil" in February and continuing through "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" last month. Most of them have topped $100 million in domestic box-office; "X2: X-Men United" is over $200 million.
Despite that success, critics have bad-mouthed many of them — and the movie-industry trade papers have pointed to the large drop-off (often 50 percent and greater) in box-office gross from the films' opening weekends to their second. But to the people on the comic-book side of the equation, this year's comic-book movies have been a bumper crop, with bigger harvests ahead in summers to come.
"While it's been a softer summer than usual, it's still affirmed that comic-book-based movies still represent a tent-pole product for the movie industry," says Avi Arad, president of Marvel Studios and chief creative office for Marvel Entertainment, which had "The Hulk," "Daredevil" and "X2: X-Men United." "The interest is strong. The appetite is there. Nothing has changed."
Adds Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, "What you have going on generally is that the part of popular culture that was reserved for me and my friends growing up 30 years ago — comic books — has spread to the mainstream. Comics about fantasy and science-fiction are now at the dead-center of what people are interested in."
The comic-book aesthetic — with dramatic angles, outsized and super-powered action, underscored by often melodramatic personal plots — is hardly new. Nor is it confined solely to movies based on comic books. Movies such as "Unbreakable" and "The Matrix" have borrowed themes, ideas and visual imagination from the comic-book universe.
But the comic-book movies of 2003 — though varied in approach — mostly have been drawn from popular publications ("X-Men," "The Hulk," "Daredevil") that have been around for a while, thus contributing to their huge opening-weekend box-office grosses. While critics cite the steep drop in subsequent attendance for "The Hulk," for example, Arad focuses on the movie's $45-million-plus opening weekend and sees it as the most significant piece of data.
"Marvel represents a community that guarantees a large opening weekend — and large DVD sales," Arad says. "It's the nature of the beast. When you have a community with incredible demand, they cannot wait for that Friday opening — and they'll even go on Thursday night if we sneak it early. The genre is powerful, it has a huge following and it gets bigger with each release."
The drop-off from the opening week can also be attributed to changes in the ways movies are released and the way audiences seemed more geared to the opening weekend.
"Movies open in a lot more theaters now — the country is saturated on opening weekend," says Paul Dergarabedian, who analyzes box-office for Exhibitor Relation. "This is an audience that, in general, likes to see movies on the first weekend. The marketing is all geared toward that first weekend so people want to see it right away."
The contemporary comic-book movie got its start with 1978's "Superman" ("You'll believe a man can fly!") and picked up converts with 1989's "Batman." But only in the past few years — as computer-generated imagery has come to look realer than real — have big-budget comic-book movies become the mainstay of summer.
The advances in CG effects have meant that comic-book superhero films — like fantasy and sci-fi stories — can duplicate in three dimensions almost any image that can be drawn in two. "X-Men" (2000) kicked off the new run, followed by "Spider-Man" (2002) — and now the 2003 run of "Daredevil," "X2," "The Hulk" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."
"What movies have done incredibly well is use CG imagery to smooth the transition from live action to superhero action," says Bill Jemas, chief operating officer of Marvel Enterprises. "They unlock the potential in the story."
Was 'Gone With the Wind' a novel-movie?
Stan Lee, Marvel's chairman emeritus who created most of Marvel Comics' biggest titles, points to the computer as the tool that made the movies look right: "I had a director say, 'There's nothing you can imagine that can't be put on screen,'" he says. But Lee believes there's more to the films' success than dazzling visual effects.
"What makes a comic-book movie good is the same thing that makes any good movie," says Lee, who is executive producer of the Marvel films. "It has to ring true. You have to care about the characters. The action has to be exciting. If you feel like you've seen it before, it kills the enjoyment. If the hero is in danger and you're involved with the hero, then you're interested and excited and can't wait to find out what happens."
To Lee, the term "comic-book movie" is a misnomer, though not necessarily an unkind one.
"I'm sure that term is pejorative to some people, though not to comic-book fans," he says. "The 'X-Men' movie, for example: Sure, it's a movie based on a comic book, but I wouldn't call it a comic-book movie. I'd call it a highly imaginative fantasy. I mean, when they did 'Gone With the Wind,' no one called it a 'novel movie.'"
"I'd call them superhero movies," Dergarabedian says. "'Comic-book movies' doesn't do them justice."
Jeff Ayers says the phrase "doesn't have a bad connotation to me. The whole genre is being pillaged for the next top-grossers. This is now the mainstream — and people don't realize it."
It's so much a part of the mainstream, Ayers says, that people who don't normally buy comics become customers at his store after seeing one of the comic-book movies.
"When the first 'Batman' came out, we couldn't keep an issue on the shelf," he says. "That's when it all started."
Jemas says, "Movies create new fans for characters. Whether we're able to turn movie-goers into comic fans depends on how well we're doing our job."
Splendor in the screen
Which could be good news for writer Harvey Pekar, whose non-superhero comics, "American Splendor," have been made into a festival-winning film of the same name, which opens Aug. 15. In a sense, "American Splendor" could be considered the anti-comic-book because Pekar celebrates his own mundane existence.
"The kind of people who get involved with superhero comics don't even know who I am," s