Word: batmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sony had a simple marketing campaign, with those billboards featuring a masked red-and-blue character and the release date (perhaps inspired by Warner Bros.' immensely successful tease for the Batman franchise in 1989). But the real genius was knowing what people cared about: the Date. It was also having a product that did not need marketing. "We knew that people know what Spider-Man is. We didn't want to come in with bombastic catchphrases," says Avi Arad, president of Marvel Studios. If a star saves 30 minutes of character exposition, a superhero probably saves a full hour...
...movie, 95% said they would recommend it to a friend; 70% said they would pay to see it again. (You usually have to bomb Baghdad to get that kind of approval ratings.) People have always liked Spider-Man: compared with the ultrasquare alien Superman and the brooding millionaire Batman, Spidey's an accidental superhero, a geeky and self-doubting teen, a comic-book character who seems a lot like a comic-book reader. Forty years after Spider-Man's birth, Marvel is still selling four different monthly Spider-Man titles that together add up to about 500,000 copies. "Everybody...
...little guy at the tail end of the Depression and upended the Nazi concept of the Ubermensch. "There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption," says DC Comics president Paul Levitz. "Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution." Batman, a morally ambiguous, revenge-driven crusader, emerged in 1939, at the outset of World War II, as the darker side of the heroic solution. Then when America entered the war, straightforwardly patriotic heroes like Captain America and Wonder Woman hit Hitler where he lived...
...that popular with girls. Getting a date was a big deal with him." If Superman is a hero who dresses up as one of us, Spider-Man is one of us, dressed up as a hero. Says Jeff Ayers, manager of New York City's Forbidden Planet comics store: "Batman's a millionaire, Superman's an alien, and Wonder Woman's an Amazon goddess. Most superheroes are foreign to us, but Spider-Man is normal and flawed...
...Superman's 64-year journey from Man of Steel to Buffy Boy is just part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work...