I don't know if anyone remembers this but many years before his death last July, Michael Jackson already met the Grim Reaper, albeit in the pages of Marvel Comics' Longshot miniseries, where he got blasted to smithereens while filming a television show on Mojoworld. I'm sure a lot of people do remember how preoccupied Marvel was with being fashionable back in the '80s (among other time periods), as perhaps best exemplified by the jeri-curled Beyonder who faced off against the Marvel Universe in Secret Wars II, and the perpetually mullet-haired Longshot himself.
But way before Blade, the first successful movie based on a Marvel Comics character came out in 1998, Hollywood was Marvel's wet dream. It was all over their comic books; whether it was fans or writers coming up with their own personal lists of who they'd like to see playing Spider-Man (with names like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt getting mentioned more than a couple of times).
It's a different world now, one where Disney has bought Marvel (for a steal, in my opinion) precisely because of the power its properties wields at the box-office, where Hugh Jackman was made a star precisely because of his appearance in the X-Men movies, which remain his highest-grossing films to date, where people like Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds and even Robert Downey Jr. campaign avidly to play Marvel characters, in some instances not even for very much money, and where studios holding the rights to Marvel films prior to the Disney acquisition scramble to make more because they don't want to lose them. Yep, it's a different world, one that more than makes up for the snubs of Marvel roles by the likes of Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, for the several aborted attempts to realize Marvel projects, one of the most notable of which was Tom Cruise's failed Iron Man endeavor at the beginning of the millenium, and even some of the creative misfires that did make it to the screen like Daredevil and Ghost Rider.
The buzz for Iron Man 2 is at a fever pitch right now and it still makes me feel all warm and tingly inside that the first one is widely regarded as the film that re-launched the career of Downey Jr., an actor whose work I have always admired.
The best part of all this is that even for this tantrum thrower, the best is yet to come.
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