up, up, and... away?
Sep. 9th, 2016 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni like movies. if you read this journal regularly, you probably know that. i like superhero movies in particular. well, at least the better-written and -directed ones, which leaves out a lot.
among total fanboiz of supers movies, there's a worry that we've hit "peak supers", the point at which supers movies will stop pulling in ever-increasing piles of cash. this bit of handwringing is often attributed to market saturation (including both audience division and audience fatigue) and the general problem of sequelitis hollywood has.
it seemed like an interesting question to me since i like some of the silly things. getting an answer isn't trivial, tho. ticket price inflation is an obvious problem. that's worse than one would think, since there's been a surge in 3-D and IMAX movies lately, and those are typically more expensive than regular movies. and inflation in foreign markets is harder to account for, due to exchange-rate differences, unknown inflation in other countries, and so on.
so, i decided to simplify the problem: US peak supers. box office mojo conveniently makes this data available. they also try to estimate the number of tickets sold, adjusting for ticket price inflation. that's what i ran with. that definition yields different results than gross receipts, but it probably means more, because it measures viewership in a single country. i'd love to be able to do that for other countries, but alas.
it seems that every superhero franchise has a clear peak, and that's usually the first movie, or the first movie of the franchise in a while:
i've labeled and color-coded the major franchises. i'd wanted to break out each of marvel/disney sub-franchises (iron man, captain america, thor, avengers ensemble) but that led to an unreadable graph. it also hid the obvious global peak for them, which is the first avengers movie.
there are a few exceptions: the dark knight, the second of chris nolan's/christian bale's batman movies is by far and away the most watched of those. this is probably due to the heath ledger's performance as the joke.
the second x-men movie, which i call y-men, also did somewhat better than the original. i'm not sure why. my guess is that it's because the x-men weren't all that popular outside of comic-book circles, and hearing about the first movie was most people's introduction to them. so friends of comics fans went to see the second and third. (the x-men franchise includes some hugh jackman/wolverine movies and the reboot. i didn't break those out for the same reason as the avengers.)
"brand-z" is a special case. it's zach synder's collection of supers movies: watchmen, man of steel, and batman vs superman. he's often blamed for screwing up what short of been obvious money-spinners for DC/warner, which owns the rights to batman and superman.
he certainly missed hitting home runs. but if both movies dramatically under-performed, they're at least base hits, being above the global average... for the top 60 supers movies. man of steel was an above-average superman movie, but that's mostly due to the dire performance of 1987 one; i had to add that point by hand, because it's actually #87 on the list. batman vs superman was hopelessly below average as a batman movie, tho, and the big z should be blamed for that.
the purple male symbol is mystery men, a b-grade supers movie -- in both meanings -- that i happen to like. it was my benchmark for second-rate supers movies. the other random points collect one-offs and minor franchises, like hellboy.
there is one other clear trend: the trend of peaks seems to be clearly upward. but it does seem like a lot of movies have been made since the avengers, so maybe we have hit peak supers. but maybe we've just hit peak movies, of all kinds, since people can binge-watch TV shows and whatnot now.
i used computer animated cartoons to try to check:
um. this is a very busy graph. it also covers only the last twenty years or so; the incredibles is labeled on both graphs as a reference point. there's also not a lot of franchises in cartoons; four of a kind is about it (shrek, ice age, and madagascar). most toon "franchises" are just an original and a sequel; those are labeled. (another how to train your dragon is in the works, which will make three of those, along with the three toy storys.)
but "peak toons", if there was one, was clearly shrek 2, back in '04. hm, maybe we have hit peak movies. i'm not very confident of that conclusion tho, because of the obvious fact that a single new peak falsifies that hypothesis.
it's hard to say one won't happen, even in the short run. the big z has apparently been sidelined for DC/warner's justice league movie, which would be a logical guess for a next peak, as would ben affleck's batman vehicle. and while pixar seems to have lost its golden touch, computer-generated movies have gotten increasingly cheap to make. so there might reasonably be a new entrant who will redefine the genre the way pixar did.
but i'll make a bet anyway: the next peak is at least five years off. pixar has a bunch of sequels planned, and while those are "safe bets", they're unlikely to set records. DC/warner, despite having a logical peak with either of its supers movies, seems to be flailing. the mess the studio made of suicide squad doesn't give me a lot of hope that their problem is just mr. synder. maybe i'm be wrong; i'll be happy to be wrong, since that means there's something worthwhile to watch.
among total fanboiz of supers movies, there's a worry that we've hit "peak supers", the point at which supers movies will stop pulling in ever-increasing piles of cash. this bit of handwringing is often attributed to market saturation (including both audience division and audience fatigue) and the general problem of sequelitis hollywood has.
it seemed like an interesting question to me since i like some of the silly things. getting an answer isn't trivial, tho. ticket price inflation is an obvious problem. that's worse than one would think, since there's been a surge in 3-D and IMAX movies lately, and those are typically more expensive than regular movies. and inflation in foreign markets is harder to account for, due to exchange-rate differences, unknown inflation in other countries, and so on.
so, i decided to simplify the problem: US peak supers. box office mojo conveniently makes this data available. they also try to estimate the number of tickets sold, adjusting for ticket price inflation. that's what i ran with. that definition yields different results than gross receipts, but it probably means more, because it measures viewership in a single country. i'd love to be able to do that for other countries, but alas.
it seems that every superhero franchise has a clear peak, and that's usually the first movie, or the first movie of the franchise in a while:
i've labeled and color-coded the major franchises. i'd wanted to break out each of marvel/disney sub-franchises (iron man, captain america, thor, avengers ensemble) but that led to an unreadable graph. it also hid the obvious global peak for them, which is the first avengers movie.
there are a few exceptions: the dark knight, the second of chris nolan's/christian bale's batman movies is by far and away the most watched of those. this is probably due to the heath ledger's performance as the joke.
the second x-men movie, which i call y-men, also did somewhat better than the original. i'm not sure why. my guess is that it's because the x-men weren't all that popular outside of comic-book circles, and hearing about the first movie was most people's introduction to them. so friends of comics fans went to see the second and third. (the x-men franchise includes some hugh jackman/wolverine movies and the reboot. i didn't break those out for the same reason as the avengers.)
"brand-z" is a special case. it's zach synder's collection of supers movies: watchmen, man of steel, and batman vs superman. he's often blamed for screwing up what short of been obvious money-spinners for DC/warner, which owns the rights to batman and superman.
he certainly missed hitting home runs. but if both movies dramatically under-performed, they're at least base hits, being above the global average... for the top 60 supers movies. man of steel was an above-average superman movie, but that's mostly due to the dire performance of 1987 one; i had to add that point by hand, because it's actually #87 on the list. batman vs superman was hopelessly below average as a batman movie, tho, and the big z should be blamed for that.
the purple male symbol is mystery men, a b-grade supers movie -- in both meanings -- that i happen to like. it was my benchmark for second-rate supers movies. the other random points collect one-offs and minor franchises, like hellboy.
there is one other clear trend: the trend of peaks seems to be clearly upward. but it does seem like a lot of movies have been made since the avengers, so maybe we have hit peak supers. but maybe we've just hit peak movies, of all kinds, since people can binge-watch TV shows and whatnot now.
i used computer animated cartoons to try to check:
um. this is a very busy graph. it also covers only the last twenty years or so; the incredibles is labeled on both graphs as a reference point. there's also not a lot of franchises in cartoons; four of a kind is about it (shrek, ice age, and madagascar). most toon "franchises" are just an original and a sequel; those are labeled. (another how to train your dragon is in the works, which will make three of those, along with the three toy storys.)
but "peak toons", if there was one, was clearly shrek 2, back in '04. hm, maybe we have hit peak movies. i'm not very confident of that conclusion tho, because of the obvious fact that a single new peak falsifies that hypothesis.
it's hard to say one won't happen, even in the short run. the big z has apparently been sidelined for DC/warner's justice league movie, which would be a logical guess for a next peak, as would ben affleck's batman vehicle. and while pixar seems to have lost its golden touch, computer-generated movies have gotten increasingly cheap to make. so there might reasonably be a new entrant who will redefine the genre the way pixar did.
but i'll make a bet anyway: the next peak is at least five years off. pixar has a bunch of sequels planned, and while those are "safe bets", they're unlikely to set records. DC/warner, despite having a logical peak with either of its supers movies, seems to be flailing. the mess the studio made of suicide squad doesn't give me a lot of hope that their problem is just mr. synder. maybe i'm be wrong; i'll be happy to be wrong, since that means there's something worthwhile to watch.