Monday Morning Quarterback

By BOP Staff

May 10, 2016

Now what?

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Felix Quinonez: I think this is an awesome result. If we compare it to the previous Cap, the growth is amazing. But if we compare it to Age of Ultron, it's a bit lower. As usual the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, the movie does have "Captain America" in the title but we can't pretend that it didn't get a box office boost from the added characters. On the other hand, I believe a lot of viewers did see it as a Cap sequel and it would be unfair to judge it as anything close to a disappointment just because it didn't match Age of Ultron. At the end of the day, I think this is yet another out of the park home run for Marvel. I haven't seen it yet but I've heard very positive word-of-mouth. So I'm really excited to see how it holds up. I'm definitely cheering for it.

Reagen Sulewski: I think there is a very, very small amount of room to look at this as a disappointment, as with its cast, there was the sense that this was something of an Avengers 2.5, but you kind of have to be looking for a fight in order to say so. Once you get above $150 million or so, you're dealing with just massive amounts of people, and any little thing have have a significant effect on opening weekend. Official Avengers film or not, it's taken a property that started off as a $60 million opener and tripled that in a few years time, adding yet more to Disney's arsenal. They still get the Avengers movies in the meantime, so it's extremely hard to me to view a 10% fall off from the peak as a sign of something bad. The devil, of course, is in the details and the final gross, but there's a stark (ha) difference between this and Batman v Superman v Joy: discussion of the film has centered on, well, the ideas raised by the film, and not in how we can raise a mob to slay the beast.

Kim Hollis: Do you believe that comic book movie fatigue is a real thing? If so, how does the performance of Captain America: Civil War impact the perception of movie-goers?

Jason Barney: Whenever I read "comic book or superhero fatigue" I have to think that the person writing the words or asking the question already has a certain bias against the history of that particular media. Fatigue? Really? The reality is that aside from Star Wars, there is no other universe, franchise, group of characters earning more money right now. Just look at the last three entries....Batman vs Superman, Deadpool, and now Captain America. With the performance of any of those films, I just don't think the word fatigue applies to audiences embracing these films.

To put it another way, even the bad comic films do well against most other movies. No fatigue there.




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Ben Gruchow: To me, for something to be fatigued implies that the genre or subgenre has been heading down the wrong path for a while. No single movie can create or sustain fatigue of a genre, nor can a simple question of quantity. The last time the superhero film tanked in the cultural consciousness, it was all blamed on Batman & Robin. Bad movie, yes, but also immediately preceded and immediately compounded by Steel, Spawn (which I liked, but I was also 14), The Crow: City of Angels, The Phantom, Barb Wire, Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, Blankman, Batman Forever. The superhero film had been lumbering to its appointment with Death for several years before B&R brought the scythe down.

We need several more BvS's, and the attendant loss or wash of revenue that comes with it, before fatigue is something that'll apply to this genre. And - excepting the surprising apparent creative failure of X-Men: Apocalypse - the genre IPs are in too solid and confident of hands to allow that to happen yet. If ever.

Felix Quinonez: I do think that comic book movie fatigue is a real thing. There definitely are people who roll their eyes at the very thought of these movies. But I don't think it comes close to being anything significant. I believe there is a portion of viewers who actively hate the genre but unfortunately for them, they aren't a big enough group to hurt these movies financially.

But I think these people are biased and have already made up their mind, so Civil War's opening weekend won't change their mind. If anything it'll make them hate the genre even more.


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