David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s right, yeah. Christopher Reeve – who can forget? It’s not like we were new to this but in the world today of like, you know, or even 2009, Iron Man grows $580 million within Marvel Studios. It wasn’t that scale yet. It wasn’t like every single blockbuster at the box office is going to be a superhero film. So it’s interesting to think about like what changed that all of a sudden caused these superhero movies to become more and more of a sure thing for the studios to make. Yeah. I don’t know. And it also kind of coincided— Well, I think the Superman and the Batman movies were always, at least I remember, kind of growing up thinking about it like, “oh yeah, I remember the Batman movies when I was a kid.” But I think it was just those two were like the big franchises, the DC franchises. And DC, I believe not always, but for certainly through all of these decades was owned by Time Warner and still is. So they were part of a big major media company and had the resources to make these big budget movies. Whereas Marvel, I don’t think ever did until this era. And so you see these superhero franchises that had obviously huge followings but weren’t the mainstream to the extent that Superman and Batman were, and now get these big film slates. I think the other thing that was happening is, is this is sort of the dawn—and I don’t know how much one led to the other—sort of the dawn of like “sequelitis” in Hollywood. And superhero movies of course, franchises lend themselves so well to sequels. Yup, very true. I mean, ever since 1939, every single one of these comic book franchises has issue after issue after issue.…

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