Word: superheroics
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dark Knight's unprecedented box-office might is "mind-boggling for us," says Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. Pictures. (TIME and Warner Bros. are both subsidiaries of Time Warner.) The film benefited from a unique mix of factors beyond the usual superhero movie hype, including a buzzed-about performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, perfectly pitched marketing, agile distribution and gas prices that have made a night at the movies an attractive alternative to a summer road trip. It also helps that The Dark Knight, as most critics and audiences attest...
...kind of films Hollywood rarely makes anymore: well-crafted stories for a mass audience. Filmgoers, it seems, have to choose between smart but dark, strange, independent or quasi-independent films, like last year's Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, or mind-numbing popcorn flicks, like the latest superhero offering from Will Smith, Hancock. WALL-E, however, seems to be stimulating both hearts and minds...
...credibility. And Hellboy, who is back this summer for a sequel, is hardly your standard man in tights. He smokes cigars, drinks Red Bull and collects kittens. "Kids aren't kids anymore," says Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. "They're so exposed to everything. They wouldn't accept really simplistic superheroes." It's likely that a superhero movie like Watchmen or The Dark Knight couldn't be appreciated by audiences without the simpler fare that came before it. You can't deconstruct the superhero until someone has constructed him, rubber nipples and all. "Watchmen is thick and complicated and violent...
...creations of oddball loners like Millar scribbling at drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office...
...Sixth Sense (1999) was a triumph of O. Henry-suspense and also an essay on the solitude of grief. Unbreakable (2000), a comic-book superhero battle told at an art-film tempo, was nearly as good and had another terrific, weighed-down performance by Willis. Signs (2002) was a letdown on the alien-invasion front, but it had Mel Gibson playing his own form of domestic desolation. The Village (2004), a sort of Amish retelling of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, was the first of his films to test - and break - the viewer's patience. And The Lady...