4 Secret Ways Superheroes Won Movies And TV

Marvel's eagerness to sell off its children to whoever would take them only grew in the '90s when the company ran into serious financial troubles. It got to the point that they once offered Sony the rights to like 90% of their characters for a mere $25 million (Sony passed on the lot but took Spider-Man and his 899 amazing friends). 

As a result, by the early 2000s, most major studios had a Marvel character or two ... and suddenly, they were all eager to show them off. It started with the X-Men movies at 20th Century Fox, which also made two Fantastic Four films and co-produced Daredevil and Elektra with Regency Pictures. Columbia Pictures/Sony got in on the action with Spider-Man and later Ghost Rider, while New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. churned out two more Blade flicks. Universal went, "Hey, we have a guy too!" with Ang Lee's Hulk and Lionsgate Films asked, "Does this count as a superhero?" with its two Punisher ones. Not sure about the first, but the second one definitely counts.

So, other than Blade's success, what changed that inspired studios to stop sitting on superhero IP and finally start making the damn movies? Well ... 

Yeah, superhero movie special effects weren't quite there yet in the '90s. There's a reason why Batman was the most prolific cinematic superhero of that decade: he's the most famous one who doesn't shoot stuff from his hands or have a sci-fi suit or anything that might look completely stupid with pre-2000s special effects. Here's an idea of what a 1997 Iron Man movie might have looked like: 

And what if X-Men had been made just a few years earlier? It could have ended up like Marvel's spectacularly crappy Generation X (1996) TV movie. The blurriness of the clips below actually makes the effects look better: 

Meanwhile, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1998) asked us to believe that this creepy David Hasselhoff robo-sex doll could pass for a real human being: 

Even the well-regarded Superman movies suffered because of the state of special effects technology in the '70s. The silly "reversing the rotation of the Earth" scene, for instance, wasn't actually in the script -- it was created because the filmmakers were extremely limited on how they could depict Superman traveling back in time. And let's not forget that the first movie asked a lot of its audience by expecting them to accept that this was a spaceship: 

It's not a coincidence that superhero movies as a whole only took off in the decade where CGI technology finally reached the point where it didn't look totally embarrassing on a giant screen. At last, movie special effects had caught up to the imagination of a bunch of '60s comic book artists. In fact, a big part of the appeal of comics back when they were an actual form of mass media was that you could see the sort of wild scenarios that could never be in a movie, but that role has gradually diminished over the decades. And that sorta leads us to our last point ... 

Of course, Sony had to scramble to remove all references to the Towers in the marketing material, and the movie itself after the 9/11 attacks violently changed New York City's skyline. They also added a couple of patriotic moments, but that wasn't really necessary -- the movie already offered the sort of fun escapist experience that was sorely needed at that point in time. And, as it turned out, for the next two decades too, at least. 

The Iraq War, the financial crisis, mass shootings, worsening climate disasters, Nazis making a comeback, more shootings, the pandemic, more shootings, more shootings ... there have definitely been more depressing periods in human history, but the difference is that back in the Middle Ages, people didn't have every awful thing going on in the world directly beamed into a little gizmo in their pockets. Is it any wonder that we've all collectively decided to escape into the bright and colorful world of superheroes for at least a few hours a month? Hell, even the "dark" and “gritty” ones offer the sort of simplistic morality we wish applied to the real world.  

Superheroes are comfort food for tired, jaded brains. They may be dumb sometimes, or even all of the time, but frankly, it's a kind of dumb that we've earned by now. Now, if you'll excuse us, we're off to watch Baby Groot dance to "Mr. Blue Sky" on a loop for an hour before gathering the courage to look at the news. 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures Releasing