What's It Gonna Take???

(This is not a piece on the current political crisis, just so anyone reading should know).

Last weekend, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's latest collaboration War of the Worlds enjoyed an auspicious debut at the box office, making something like $111 million over the six-day fourth of July frame and thereby making the second best debut within that period, behind only last year's Spider-Man 2, with a towering (and in my opinion, richly deserved) $180 million. When asked how he felt about their film coming in at a distant second (to the all time record), Rob Friedman, the head of distribution at paramount, could have said a lot of things. He could have said "well, Spielberg movies have long legs" or "well, this movie got good reviews and could go the distance" or something else extolling War's qualities vis-a-vis potential longevity.

Instead he said "this is not a sequel. This is not a comic-book film. This is a 100-year-old literary property...blah blah blah." He kind of lost me after that egregiously cheap shot. And it really hit me: comic book/graphic novel based properties are still treated like second-class citizens in Hollywood by a distressingly large number of people. There are still closed-minded assholes out there who won't see a movie because "it's a comic book film."

Comic book movies have long achieved box-office legitimacy. Every decade since the seventies has had at least one landmark comic book movie, such as Superman (1978), Batman (1989), Men in Black (1997), and Spider-Man (2002). This millenium seems to be a particularly good time for comic book-based films, with a total of ten such films opening at number one in box-offices all around the world since 2000. In 2002, a film based on an independent comic book called Ghost World, received an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. In 2003, the comic-book based film Road to Perdition received six such nominations, including a Supporting Actor nod for the legendary Paul Newman, and won an Oscar for its cinematography.

So why in God's name do so many people still look at films based on comic books with such scorn? It kind of seems silly to champion thse films, given their success, but I honestly believe somebody should. You don't see comic book movies being honored at the BAFTA awards or the Cannes Film Festival. Even in Hollywood, some studios that own rights to comic book properties seem to treat them like their least valuable commodities, i.e. they don't bother springing for reputable writers, actors or visual effects houses, but just let nobodies cobble the film together, throw together some kind of marketing campaign and set the movie afloat hoping audiences and critics will embrace it, often not even caring about the latter. At least in Japan, where manga is recognized as a legitimate cultural institution, there seems to be a measure of respect for such material.

Apparently, the early reviews for Fantastic Four, which opens this weekend, were bad. The lot of them said that this movie was no Spider-Man 2, or even a Batman Begins, which oddly enough, kind of gives me a sense of hope, given that people acknowledge that there are good comic-book movies out there. Bad press notwithstanding, I sincerely hope the Four kick War right off that top spot on the charts. It might just help slam the point home that comic book movies are here to stay, and therefore deserve some measure of respect.

Maybe if a comic-book derived movie swept the Oscars, a la Return of the King, things would be different...