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While I have seen several superhero movies (the first one being the 1989 Batman), and have found most to be enjoyable, I see one major problem with them. Hollywood likes its film franchises and it seems that in the last ten years it has become obsessed with them more and more. The problem with superhero movies is that they do not have a definite ending point like those based on books (think Twilight, Harry Potter, and now Hunger Games). Superhero movies can spawn endless sequels that tend to decrease in quality. For example the 1989 Batman was good, Batman Returns was decent, Batman Forever was okay, and Batman and Robin was terrible. The Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies were also like this as were the X-Men movies. X-Men seems to have spawned more movies and Spiderman has been rebooted only five years later. This is not meant to be a rant (I did see and enjoy Avengers which will likely have sequels) but just an observation. Anyone agree?
Loving comics like I do, the nature of super hero stories really isn't suited to movies. They are much better suited toward episodes, and therefore TV. But TV shows don't have the budgets needed for the big special effects most super hero stories need. George Reeves in pajamas and a cape just wouldn't cut it for modern audiences.
The decreasing quality of sequels tends to have more to do with who is making the movies than the themes themselves. Take the X-films, for example. The studio hired Bryan Singer to make the first one and gave him almost no money to do it. But Bryan Singer is incredibly talented and made a great movie that made tons of money. So they let him make X2 with a decent budget this time, and he made one of the greatest super hero flicks ever made. And then the studio hired the hack Brett Ratner, who made the truly horrible X3.
Same thing happened with the '90s Batflicks. Started good, but then the studio decided they wanted to sell more toys, so they hired Joel Schumacher to "kid friendlyize" the movies.
The first Spidey flicks kept Raimi, but the studio monkeyed with the third film so much and forced the director to do things he didn't want to do that it ended up a mess.
Superman is a hard one. He has one of the best origin stories of any hero in mythology. But once that is told, he's kind of uninteresting and hard to sustain.
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