- Position‹2 of 2
- Comic book movies are only recently becoming popular.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has come a long way in the past couple of decades. What was once impossible to show the audience has now become possible. This makes comic book films more realistic and enjoyable.
The argument
This argument explains the recent popularity of comic book movies by a change in the technology available to make them rather than by any change in the stories or the audience. The problem the genre has always faced is one of belief. The challenge in creating a compelling comic book movie has been suspending disbelief — making the audience feel that they are witnessing extraordinary feats rather than watching cheap camera tricks. The source material is built on the extraordinary, and for most of the genre's history film could not render it convincingly. A superhero whose powers look faked undermines the story in a way that no amount of good writing can repair, because the audience is being asked to take seriously something the screen is visibly failing to deliver. CGI removed the obstacle. It made it possible to display superpowers realistically on screen, a feat that was extremely difficult before high-tech computer imagery became commonplace. The special effects used in films such as Iron Man, Thor, Batman v Superman and the Avengers pictures would not have been possible with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s. It is not only the kind of effect that has changed but the degree to which these films use them, which is only possible with the CGI available today. The audience's motive supplies the last step. People watch comic book movies for the fictional and the fantastic, and to see is to believe. Once the technology could make the fantastic look real, the genre could finally deliver what people came for — which is why comic book movies have only recently become popular.
Premises
Counter-arguments
People go to see comic book movies for the character, not for the big CGI fights. Further, Superheroes like Batman and Superman had successful and popular movies in the '70s and '80s in spite of the fact that CGI technology at the time was nothing near what it is today.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise assumes the genre's problem was technical, which the counter-argument on record disputes: audiences attend for the characters and the stories, and a convincing effect does not by itself produce an engaging film — as the many expensively rendered failures in the genre demonstrate. [Rejecting P2] The capability claim is true and the causal claim is not. Computer-generated imagery matured through the 1990s, and the genre's commercial breakthrough came with Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man around the turn of the century, when the tools were considerably less capable than the films the argument names. [Rejecting P3] The counter supplies the direct counter-example: Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989 were among the largest commercial successes of their years using optical and practical effects, which shows audiences accepted the fantastic long before the technology the argument credits. [Rejecting C] Better explanations are available and unaddressed — the consolidation of the underlying rights in a few studios, the shared-universe release model that turned individual films into instalments, and the growth of international box office, which favours effects-driven material that travels across languages.