- 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
The challenge in creating a compelling comic book movie has always been suspending disbelief and making the audience believe that they are witnessing extraordinary feats, rather than cheap camera tricks. CGI has made it possible to realistically display superpowers on the silver screen, a feat that was incredibly challenging to accomplish before high-tech CGI became commonplace. Special effects like those used in Ironman, Thor, Batman V. Superman, and the Avengers films would never have been possible with the technology of the 1980s and '90s. The effects they use and the degree to which they use them is only made possible by CGI technology today. People see comic book movies for the fictional and fantastic, and to see is to believe. The introduction of CGI to comic book movies explains their rise in popularity.
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.