Word: x-men
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...Hollywood is profiting from the comic book industry - the forthcoming $139 million Spider-Man is expected to vie with Star Wars 2 as the summer hit - the comics business sorely needs the movies. Marvel, owners of famous properties including Spider-Man and The X-Men, even filed for bankruptcy (it has since recovered) in 1996. Before The X-Men movie, says Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, the entire industry was in freefall, losing 7% to 10% of its readers every month...
...point, losing around $40 million. Now though, the cinematic landscape has changed. The vampire-hunting Blade grossed over $112 million in 1998, while 1997's Men in Black (both were based on comic books) became the 13th-highest grosser ever, with $589 million. After 2000's The X-Men took $294.3 million, the pitches came thick and fast...
...first of the new adaptations - shot straight to the top of the British box-office chart, clocking up more than $3.5 million in its opening Easter weekend. The next two years will see the release of Spider-Man, Men In Black 2, The Hulk, Daredevil and X-Men 2. There are ongoing negotiations for plenty more, including Ghost Rider, reportedly with Nicolas Cage, The Punisher and a Batman relaunch. The comics2film website lists over 200 projects currently ready - or rumored to be ready - for film adaptation. The war of the screen superheroes, with superbucks the prize, is well under...
...them justice." Lee's innovation was the creation of (his words) "superheroes with superproblems." Marvel Comics' film division CEO Avi Arad - one of the key players in the movie adaptations market - believes their humanity gives supermen and -women contemporary appeal. "The characters are pained," he says, pointing to The X-Men's antiracism overtones. "Through them we deal with the real world and real emotions...
Hollywood, though, is a dollars-and-cents neighborhood, and Tom Rothman, chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment (producer of The X-Men), believes comics are low risk. "Comics and screen are both visually-driven media," he says. "If you can create indelible characters in one, the chances are that they will work in the other. And characters like the X-Men have been proved to work in comics for 20 years." The $75 million X-Men movie, he insists, was the film that opened the floodgates: "X-Men kicked ass. People thought it was unfilmable because there was no one obvious...