Why are comic book movies so popular?

Comic book movies have long been popular, they just haven't been very successful

Question: Why are comic book movies so popular?
Position1 of 2›: Comic book movies have always been popular.
Argument: Comic book movies have long been popular, they just haven't been very successful

Over the last couple of decades, nothing has really changed to effect whether comic book movies are popular or not. Rather, Hollywood has finally perfected the formula for a good comic book movie after decades of minor successes.

The argument

The claim here is not that comic book movies are a recent phenomenon but that their popularity long predates their quality. From Superman (1978), to Batman (1989), to Blade (1998), comic book movies have always drawn audiences; what they have not always been is perfect. The genre spent a long time working out the formula for adapting a comic to the silver screen, and has only recently perfected it. Popularity and success, on this account, are two different things, and conflating them is what makes the modern superhero boom look like an invention of recent years rather than the end point of a much longer process. The mechanism proposed is trial and error. Through many decades of attempts, comic book movies have seen their fair share of failure alongside their hits. Those failures were instructive in specific ways: overly campy takes on the Dark Knight showed one direction that did not work, and excessively dark depictions of traditionally upbeat and honest characters like Superman showed another. Each misfire narrowed the range of plausible approaches, and told studios something about the distance between a character as written on the page and a character who can hold a feature-length film together. Over enough attempts, that accumulated negative knowledge becomes a positive craft. This, in part, is what allowed Christopher Nolan to make what is considered to be the gold standard of comic book movies, The Dark Knight (2008). Nolan was not working from nothing; he was working from a genre that had already established, expensively and publicly, what works and what does not. Comic book movies are so successful because they have had time to fail. Hollywood has learned from its mistakes and come to understand how best to adapt these characters to the silver screen, which means today's success rests on an audience appetite that was there all along and a craft that took decades to catch up with it.

Premises

[P1]Comic book movies have existed and drawn audiences for decades, from Superman (1978) to Batman (1989) to Blade (1998). [P2] Through years of trial and error — and failures like overly campy or excessively dark takes — Hollywood gradually learned how best to adapt these characters. [P3] That accumulated experience let films like Nolan's The Dark Knight finally perfect the formula. [C] Therefore, comic book movies have always been popular; they simply hadn't always been successful.

Counter-arguments

While comic book movies have had decades to perfect the way that the source material is adapted to the silver screen, this doesn't account for the extent to which comic book movies are successful today. The James Bond and Indiana Jones franchises have both had decades to perfect their craft, but neither are anywhere near as successful as the comic book movie industry.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] "Popular" is doing two jobs at once. That a handful of comic adaptations were released and made money across three decades establishes that some succeeded, not that the form was consistently popular — the same period contains a long run of commercial failures, and the release rate was a fraction of what it later became. The premise needs a claim about sustained demand and offers a list of hits. [Rejecting P2] The trial-and-error account is unfalsifiable as stated. Any industry's history can be narrated as learning what works, and the premise supplies no independent way to identify the lesson except by pointing at what later succeeded. It also has to explain why the same accumulated craft did not prevent expensive failures after 2008. [Rejecting P3] The mechanism does not fit the outcome. As the counter-argument notes, other franchises have had as long to refine their formulas without approaching this scale of success, which suggests the change was structural rather than a matter of craft: digital effects that finally made these stories filmable, a connected-universe release model, and studio consolidation around tentpole production. The conclusion also concedes the case against itself, since "popular but not successful" is close to a contradiction where popularity is measured at the box office.

Proponents cited

Christopher Orr
“From the mid-20th century onward, screen portrayals of superheroes—and Batman in particular—had generally been tongue-in-cheek. In the 1960s, ABC’s Batman series, with its “bat Geiger counter” and “alphabet-soup bat container,” favored overt silliness. In the ’80s and ’90s, Tim Burton’s and Joel Schumacher’s movies tended toward high camp, with Danny DeVito cast as the Penguin, for example, and Jim Carrey as the Riddler... But Nolan’s pictures, especially The Dark Knight, were something entirely new. As some Dark Knight naysayers—notably New York magazine’s David Edelstein—observed at the time, superheroes are not, by their nature, obvious candidates for thoughtful drama. They tend to wear ridiculous costumes and wield implausible powers. But Nolan set a high bar for the newly somber enterprise”