Steven Grant, as is his thing, fears the worst:
It’d be nice if in this “year of the comic book” comics sales in general would pick up for a change, but I guess when it rains during a long drought it’s impolite to ask for drinking water too. The only thing that bothers me about this is the inevitable backlash.
No, not that backlash. This one.
See, there are two kinds of people in Hollywood now: those who grew up with comics and love them, and those who didn’t and don’t and sit scratching their heads trying to figure out what the big deal is. (The third group is those who never read comics but now find them oddly fascinating, but those are mostly actors, who aren’t germane to the discussion.) The first group is mostly younger guys with their own projects, like Allan Heinberg (now writing for Marvel) or their own production companies, like Benderspink. (There are a lot of highly placed comics geeks at Benderspink.) They’re the guys who will be making all the real decisions in Hollywood in 20 years.
The second group are the guys making the decisions now.
So what I anticipate in a year, year and a half, should SPIDER-MAN III and FF II be the big box office guns expected, we’ll see another round of superhero parody films. Why? Because there’s still a widespread assumption that all comics are superhero comics, people who know comics the least cling the most to that assumption, and the second group is made up of people who know comics the least. And since they believe - correctly, but so what? - that superheroes are an innately silly idea (the success of HEROES (NBC, Mondays 8P) is not likely to change their minds, since that has pretty much gone out of its way to not refer to any of its “heroes” as superheroes, and, like SMALLVILLE, doesn’t put its heroes in gaudy costumes, which is their shorthand for “see? These aren’t really superheroes!”; SMALLVILLE’s longevity isn’t much of an argument in those circles either, since being a hit on The CW (Thursdays 8P) is like being the world’s tallest midget) they’re pretty much suckers for any pretty face with script that says, “Let’s mock the whole idea of superheroes.”
