Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 5:14PM 'Justice League of America' not following Marvel's Footsteps
Everyone knows that Marvel's 'Avenger' movie has more buzz than a beehive and at this point, they can release a pound of horse excrement and still gross over $100 million. However, IGN reports that Diane Nelson, President of DC Entertainment says that the company will not copy Marvel's strategy and a 'Justice League of America' is not being planned.
Says Nelson, "People make an assumption that we're going to mirror Marvel's strategy, for example with Avengers, we do have a very different attitude about how you build a content slate. And it isn't necessarily about connecting those properties together to build into a single thing. We think we've got great stories and characters that will lend themselves to great standalone experiences, and that's the way we're focusing on it."
It almost feels like the guys over at DC are sick and tired of the comparisons. Nelson goes on to say, "there is not a single thing we've done that has been reactive to Marvel from the creation of DC Entertainment to today. People can speculate but they are wrong."
Well Diane, I'm sure your shareholders of Time Warner WISH you could be more like Marvel. Check out these stats I've found.
Number of Marvel Comics vs. DC's movies launched? 22 vs. 20
Total Gross at the Box Office? $3,590,220,663 vs. $2,312,145,361
Average Gross Per Movie? $163,191,848 vs. $115,607,268
Source: Box Office Mojo
If some of you still think $1.2 billion is not that big of a difference, the numbers are actually a bit misleading because $533 million of DC's $2.3 billion is from one movie (The Dark Knight). Looks to me that Marvel is doing something right.
Reader Comments (11)
The major thing that Marvel is doing right is capitalizing on the comic-book movie genre. DC is tirelessly slow especially since they haven't pushed forward for the Wonder Woman movie and are moving to Hollywood right now. I think that once they strategize on what they want (like settle on the third Batman film and the Superman property gets lifted off) then I'm pretty sure that they'll be able to surpass Marvel.
Who do you think has better IP and commercially viable characters? Marvel or DC?
I tend to believe that Marvel's characters lend themselves better to the public's current taste in movies (though that could be my generally distaste for DC characters besides Batman). That said, DC's inability to take advantage of current market trends is inexcusable given that unlike Marvel, DC wouldn't even have to go through the process of turfing out its' properties to outside studios for production and distribution since the company is owned by WB.
D, Marvel is owned by Disney so they both are in the same situation in terms of being able to produce it internally.
I don't think DC wants or cares what you geeks web-site says.
Joe, never said they did. Also if DC doesn't "want something", it means that they care, so your statement contradicts itself. Yes, we're a geek website and damn proud of it!
Actually it's not the same situation at all. Disney owns Marvel now but that was a recent acquisition and Disney has yet to release a Marvel property. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevi and related characters are all at Fox and Spider Man and related characters are at Sony and while Marvel does control the rights to all the Avengers characters, thus far all of the it's films (Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Hulk) have all been distributed by Paramount and it still owes Paramount two more films (Thor and The Avengers itself. The truth is of the $3,590,220,663 Marvel flicks have made, only $312,128,345 has come since the Disney merger and that amount had to be split with Paramount. I should have clarified in my initial post, but you also should have known all this.
PS. Sorry about the formatting error, forgot to put /i after Daredevil.