FEATURE
A CULTURAL LONGING / BY ROB HORSLEY /
W
hile a trip to the movies may not be as commonplace is in years past, box office records continue to be smashed yearover-year—particularly in summer months. Summer and winter are the two seasons in which movie attendance typically jumps up. Think about it— it’s too cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, so where’s a guy to go for a couple hours of some outof-the-house, indoor entertainment? Movies are the perfect getaway for folks looking to escape the elements. But whereas the colder months have come to be known as “Oscarbait” season, when studios release their ‘best’ films—movies made largely to garner as much critical
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attention as possible—in summer, the big-budget blockbuster reigns supreme. And for a good part of the last two decades, it’s been the ‘supermovies’ leading the way.
SUPER SUCCESSFUL Superheroes, as well as the comic books they appear in, have been a huge part of popular culture for decades, but it’s only in relatively recent times that their influence and popularity has spilled over into the more mainstream world of film. Though there are some notable exceptions, such as Superman (1978) and Batman (1989), movies based on comic books have, historically and as a whole, been pretty awful. But more recently, beginning with Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000), the ‘super-movie’ has gone
from being wildly inconsistent (and sometimes laughably bad) to one of the movie industry’s most bankable genres. In 2008, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the second installment of Warner Bros.’ rebooted Batman series, was released to universal critical acclaim and was a box office smash, earning more than $1 billion in ticket sales and becoming the fourth highest-grossing picture of all time. But more importantly, this was perhaps the first instance where audiences as a whole were treated to a movie that could be watched and enjoyed by adult audiences everywhere—not just fans of comic books. If Bryan Singer cultivated the soil with X-Men, and Christopher Nolan
