Original subtitles

Once they were larger-than-life idols

created to entertain children

and were dismissed by the adult world.

But in the new millennium,

characters created over half a century ago

have re-emerged to dominate the box office world wide.

This is the story of how superheroes

have successfully transitioned

from the comic book page to the silver screen

and conquered popular culture...

What comics had over movies

is they were ahead of the audience.

They were a rough and ready

cheap to produce medium.

And Hollywood is just now,

50, 60 years later catching up.

Mr. Robert Downey Jr.

The idea to me

of high school jocks and the popular kids

grabbing their buddies together

and racing out on opening night

to see a movie where Thor and Captain America

and Iron Man fend off an alien invasion

was mind-boggling.

There's still an appeal for characters

an audience can see themselves in

but can see what they wish they could do

and just cannot. That they can fly.

That they can swing from webs.

That they can beat up a bully.

And there's just something intrinsically cool

and appealing about superheroes who do that.

This is now exploding.

It is the mainstream.

Summer, 1989.

A new phenomenon has arisen

that fuels the imagination of audiences across the globe.

Ever since the first reports

that a new Batman feature film was imminent,

helmed by young director Tim Burton,

anticipation has been high.

And now, as the film prepares for general release,

on the streets of cities world wide

its presence is impossible to ignore.

This phenomenon is quickly called "Batmania".

There really had never been anything

quite like it at that magnitude.

You'd seen merchandise successes,

obviously Star Wars.

You'd seen merchandizing failures.

Dr. Dolittle.

You would see other things follow it

like Dick Tracy.

But this one was different.

It was so alien and so crazy

and the anticipation was so high.

I remember when I was a kid and the trailer came out.

I remember being with all my friends

and we just looked at each other.

We paid to go in the theater

just to watch the trailer 'cause there was no Internet.

- Vicki Vale. - Bruce Wayne.

And what do you do for a living?

We just sat there

with our mouths open.

What alternate reality did I wake up in

where I'm watching a trailer for a Batmanmovie?

And although the focus of this hysteria

was a new feature film,

the release reawakened interest

in the character of Batman himself

and helped revitalize the medium

from which he had emerged -

the comic book.

When Tim Burton's Batman came out

people were definitely reading comics,

but it wasn't super cool to be reading comics.

But when that film came out and the marketing started

and you had just that Bat symbol

it looked so cool. It wasn't about the actors.

It was just about the symbol and the character.

The whole marketing plan

behind the Tim Burton Batman film

did so much to broaden comic book culture

and superhero culture into all kinds of merchandise

and all kinds of mainstream fashion.

I remember I was in high school

just a few years earlier

and I never wore superhero t-shirts

and I don't remember seeing anybody who did.

Then all of a sudden in 1989

everyone's wearing Batman t-shirts.

That's the point where geek culture, if you will,

had started to become cool.

The film was released to coincide

with the 50th anniversary of its iconic lead character,

and during Batman's half-century lifespan,

comic books,

and the superheroes portrayed in their pages,

had drifted in and out of mainstream consciousness.

But they had never been 'cool' before,

and from the very inception

of the American comic book industry

in the late 1930s,

they had always been dismissed

as throwaway entertainment for children.

It was an industry pitched to kids.

They were cheap. They cost a dime.

They were sold in drugstores and candy stores.

Kids would show up and would put their dime,

their 20, 30 cents.

They'd roll them up, stick them in their back pocket.

Maybe they'd trade them with friends.

They were basically something you bought

with a soda and a pack of bubble gum.

You stored them under your bed.

And when you grew up

and you were 16 you never read them again.

But from the pages

of these children's picture books

would emerge heroes who have endured until the present day.

Although the formative years of the industry were focused

on short strips and comedy characters,

by the late 1930s two of its defining icons

were developed by New York publisher DC comics.

In Action Comics Issue One,

duo Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

introduced Superman,

and in response the following year

Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman.

The all-powerful son of Krypton

and the Dark Knight Detective

became archetypes for all of the superheroes

who followed in their wake.

When Superman was created

they did create a superhero from another planet

who is in effect almost like a god, but not.

He really wants to be a man.

He really wants to be Clark Kent.

He is the end of the spectrum.

All superheroes are less than him.

Batman is not a superhero at all.

He just wears a costume.

Batman is an everyman

who trained himself to become a great detective

and a great athlete.

All the other comic book superheroes

lie between these two characters.

These are the alpha and omega of our industry.

An immediate hit with young readers,

comic book publishers rushed to develop new superheroes

to capitalize on the success of Superman and Batman.

And this creative boom occurred

just as another industry was also enjoying

an upsurge of interest from young audiences.

With the advent of sound in cinema,

Hollywood was thriving,

and film companies were looking for new material

to bring to the silver screen.

With their larger-than-life characters

and their dynamic visual style,

comic books represented

an instantly compatible artform.

Comics at their best are very cinematic.

If you look at storyboards for movies,

they're comic book pages.

The closer you can get comics

to the feel of a movie and the flow of a movie

the better they are.

Not to say that one medium is superior over the other.

In the late 30s, early 40s

when people went to the movies it was an all-day affair.

You would have an 'A' picture, you'd have a 'B' picture,

you'd have cartoons, shorts, newsreels.

And really far down on the bill was something called a serial.

Flash!

Don't fire.

Save yourself, Flash.

You'll be burned to a cinder.

I'm setting you free first.

He has chosen his own death!

These were the bottom feeders

for mostly kids who saw Saturday matinees.

They might be 18 minutes long,

they were black and white,

they were filmed on an absolute shoestring.

They started with westerns.

Flash Gordon crept in in the late 30s

and someone spent an extra $1.50.

Superheroes start appearing on the scene, '38, '39, '40,

so it was a no brainer to try to get them in

to these movies.

It was pretty logical that

once comic book superheroes did become

very popular and visible

that they would make the transition

or attempt to make the transition to the screen,

to the cinema.

Bob Kane, Bill Finger were very influenced

by Citizen Kane.

Jerry Robinson, an early Batman artist,

took a lot of images from

German expressionist films

and put that intoBatman.

Of course, when a Batman serial did come out,

it didn't look anything like Citizen Kane

or anything like German expressionist films.

Oh, a Jap!

It is useless for you to struggle.

My zombies are too strong,

even for a superior person like yourself to cope with.

When I was a kid, I watched the Batman serials,

which were terrible.

I watched the Superman serials which were great.

I watched all this stuff when I went to the movies

with my friends.

So it wasn't just the comic books

we had rolled up in our back pocket.

It was the serials that we saw on Saturday morning

with the cartoons.

Those things were part of an evolutionary process

that got cut in 1953.

Just asSuperman graduated from the serials

to a household name through a successful television show,

comic books fell under the scrutiny

of the US censors.

As national concerns over juvenile delinquency

reached fever pitch,

comic books were singled-out as a bad influence

on young, impressionable minds.

Having entered the mainstream momentarily,

superheroes were once again cast into obscurity.

And here they remained

until the world was turned upside down in the 1960s.

As the Beatles heralded the dawn of a vibrant,

youth-driven popular culture, into this brave new world

came the return to screens of the Dark Knight detective.

And unlike his past incarnation

in the movie serials,

this Batman became an international sensation.

Yes, Commissioner.

Dreadful news. Catwoman is on the prowl again.

We're on our way.

To the Batpoles.

WhenBatman appeared

on American television in 1966,

no one had really seen Batman.

There were a couple of serials

but this was a full color multi-million dollar

twice weekly television episode.

And the great thing that people forget about the '66 Batman

was it was shown at 7:30 at night

and it was the first superhero thing, media thing

ever pitched at a time when adults could also watch it.

Batman became an adult phenomenon.

It exploded this world of Bat paraphernalia

and Bat merchandise.

I would venture to say that the Batmobile

from the 1966-67 series

is probably still the most recognizable car

in American history.

Just as I thought, she's mined the road with explosives.

No wonder you had me put on the Bat armor.

Gosh, you really think of everything, Batman.

What's that?

Although the Bat armor protected our car,

those landmines blew our tires.

Robin, turn on the automatic tire repair device.

In the 1960s, you had theBatman TV show

which was extremely successful, but it was all about camp.

It was walking this line between on the one hand

kids were happy to see their hero on TV

and generally took the adventures at face value,

but, of course, adults were watching it and laughing at it

and by implication laughing

at comic book superheroes in general.

Got you, you thieves!

One move and you're a dead duo.

Holy Bat trap!

Let's fight our way out of this.

It was intended to be campy.

It was intended to be a satire.

The writing of the show was stupid and wonderful

at the same time. It was just a fantastic thing.

It wasn't Batman but it was a good satire.

It was inspiring

because you could then look at it and say,

"That's not Batman.

But at least we're doing comic books.

It's beginning, OK."

Who had the foresight to know it's beginning?

Nobody. Not really.

But now we can look back on it and say,

"Yes, it's beginning."

While this pop art parody was propelling Batman

into the very heart of the 60s cultural revolution,

in the comic book world,

a new force was transforming the industry

and rewriting the rules - Marvel.

Although the company had its origins

in the comic book boom of the late 1930s,

it was in the 1960s

that it truly made its presence felt,

powered by the remarkable drive

of writer and editor, Stan Lee.

In a surge of inspiration,

he created a wealth of very modern superheroes

who proved to have an enduring appeal.

The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil,

The Avengers, Iron Man -

these are the cadre

of great Marvel characters that he created

with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko almost overnight.

He created them all within two years which is astonishing.

And what Stan Lee did was to take these costume geeks,

these weirdoes, and set them in New York City,

and he could bring in tensions from the 1960s,

radiation, communism, alienation,

and he simply made them psychological and human.

Every Marvel hero, no matter how ridiculous,

tried to have a base

in a reality that the audience could understand.

I had no interest in Clark Kent's life,

or Superman's life.

Bruce Wayne was as far beyond the reality

I was seeing around me

as realistically Donald Trump.

That was what was cool about Spider-Man,

about Peter Parker.

He's a high school student

and he was a high school student

in a way that appealed to geeks -

he wore a tie, a sleeveless vest.

That struck painfully close to home.

These Marvel characters

soon became household names,

quickly transferred from the comic book page

to the television set

through successful cartoon series.

Their appeal was largely confined

to the youth market, however,

and superheroes continued to be regarded

as children's entertainment.

This would alter in the following decade.

With a change in ownership,

DC comics had been brought into Warner Communications,

a vast media group

with a powerful film production arm.

This led, in 1978,

to the first superhero blockbuster,

featuring DC's pioneering Man of Steel...

While Marvel was outdoing DC

in the comic books

it was totally the opposite in cinema

because DC had the most recognizable characters

for a mass audience.

So when the Christopher Reeve Supermanmovie came out

that was obviously a huge success.

What the hell's that?

Easy, Miss. I've got you.

You... You've got me? Who's got you?!

It came at a particular time

when big ticket cinema events

were suddenly really appealing to audiences.

The idea of queueing round the block,

hence the 'blockbuster' name,

was something that suddenly became very exciting to people.

And I think he was obviously a very well-known property,

a very famous property, probably the most famous.

And, of course, it is a family film,

but it isn't a kid's film.

Certainly the first and second

Superman movies of the late 70s

with Christopher Reeve, directed by Richard Donner

and then Richard Lester.

They to me are mythic American storytelling.

They roll out his origin.

Superman 2 is a fantastic Greek story

where he has to give up his powers to be happy

or is he going to be unhappy and save the world?

This is mythic stuff.

With an all-star cast

and the largest budget ever spent on a feature film,

Superman andSuperman II were shot back to back

and released to enormous commercial

and critical success.

And despite the limitations of visual effects at the time,

as the original film's poster exclaimed,

it made audiences believe that a man could fly.

The challenge to any comic book adaptation

is making it realistic.

For any sci-fi film, for any genre film

that involves fantasy or these elements,

it's the willing suspension of disbelief.

If we can't believe that Christopher Reeve was flying

in the first Supermanfilm,

if we can't believe that these characters have these powers.

But I think more importantly, if we can't believe

that the actor playing it believes

that they are shooting optic beams out of their eyes

or reading the thoughts of others,

or teleporting across vast distances

it's not going to sell to the audience.

But Superman didn't start a trend

and in its wake

only a handful of superhero adaptations followed.

In the comics world, however, things were changing.

This was nowhere more apparent

than in the pages of "Batman",

a hero who had undergone a radical rethink

since the camp caricature of the 60s TV show...

At first, that had a big impact

on comic book sales of Batman. They really spiked.

But they started to follow the TV show a little bit.

Then when the TV crashed

and the ratings plummeted, and then it was canceled,

the Batman comic books were left in this

'what do we do now?'

Fortunately, I think the writer Denny O' Neil

and Neal Adams took a very different approach.

They took Batman out of the TV show completely.

They went back to the Batman

that appeared in 1939, 1940.

And then got kind of whitewashed out.

It was a dark avenger who only existed at night.

He represented vengeance.

He represented retribution.

He led a very tough life.

And you had these solo adventures of Batman

that Frank Miller picked up on

in the early 1980s and turned into the Dark Knightsaga.

And it was this darker vision of Batman

that would draw superheroes

into a far grittier world in the 1980s.

With the release

of Frank Miller's seminal graphic novel

Dark Knight Returns and Allan Moore'sKilling Joke,

the comic book successfully transcended its roots

as children's entertainment, and became more adult,

more bleak and often more violent.

In February 1989,

just as trailers began circulating

for the forthcoming feature film,

headlines across America

were focused on the Batman comic itself,

and a four-issue story

that ended with the murder of Robin.

You're on this path

where Batman is kind of a bellwether character.

All comics become as mature as Batman,

or they become as dark as Batman.

Batmankind of leads the way.

Obviously when Tim Burton goes to do the character,

and the screenwriter is assigned

and everything else,

they're looking at the current comics

so the character was turning dark.

And then you add Tim Burton to the mix

and you get what Tim Burton brings

and that's how you end up with that movie.

As much as the Batman craze of 1989

was driven by publicity,

the film itself was marketed

as the brainchild of director Tim Burton,

and this was key to its appeal.

A gifted filmmaker with a distinctive vision,

he signaled a new Hollywood

that was young, alternative and modern.

Ah!

Tim Burton's Batman was personal.

He's got a great look.

He's got a great sense of things.

It was inviting a creative talent

into the field of doing comic books.

He couldn't have done it in any other way if he tried.

Don't kill me. Don't kill me, man.

Don't kill me. Don't kill me, man!

I'm not going to kill you. I want you to do me a favor.

I want you to tell all your friends about me.

Who are you?

I'm Batman.

What Tim Burton did in his film was

he kept it centered in the Tim Burton universe.

If you look at his long list of films

from A Nightmare Before Christmas

to Beetle juice to Edward Scissor hands

there's a consistency across the board.

It has a Tim Burton DNA.

He was able to bring in the elements of Batman

that people really understood as Batman.

Gotham was dark.

It had an element of danger that was omnipresent

which someone like Batman to wage a war on crime.

He got all the right things right

while still putting the Tim Burton imprint on it.

Yet the film was not without controversy.

When it had initially been announced,

comic books fans were outraged over the casting

of Michael Keaton in the lead role,

an actor more associated with comedy than drama.

Yet he proved an inspired choice.

Michael Keaton is the last person

you would expect to see as Batman,

looking at any of the actors who played it over the years,

and yet he was perfect.

Excuse me. Excuse me!

Excuse me...

Could you tell me which of these guys

is Bruce Wayne?

Well, I'm not sure.

Thanks anyway.

- Yeah. - Pretty.

Huh? Oh, certainly. Yeah.

Michael Keaton was

exceptional casting.

Burton always said that

he wanted an unexceptional Bruce Wayne

who would make an extraordinary Batman.

And I think what we saw because of Batman

was the idea that you didn't necessarily need

an action movie star

to make an action movie.

You cast the human alter-ego,

not the superhero.

With Jack Nicholson's

scene-stealing performance as the Joker,

Kim Basinger becoming a household name

as love interest Vicki Vale

and a soundtrack album

featuring all new material by Prince,

Batman not only revitalized superhero movies,

but rewrote the rule book

on how to successfully launch a blockbuster franchise.

It was the first

pre-ordained blockbuster of the modern age.

It was revolutionary.

It broke the opening weekend record by a lot.

It made $100 million in ten days

It showed Hollywood that

there was an entire world of properties

that weren't necessarily originated as film

that can be made into movies.

The film industry's focus

was not primarily on comic books, however,

andBatman was seen as a revival

of both a once successful TV series

and of a 40s pulp fiction hero.

Over the coming years,

this would see big screen outings

for Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer

and other icons of the movie serials

as well as adaptations of classic television shows.

Studios were also now aware

of the box office potential of superheroes,

and looked to Marvel for characters

that could translate to the big screen.

But the three films that emerged

in Batman's wake - The Punisher,

Captain America and The Fantastic Four-

were ultra low-budget disappointments

that most audiences didn't get a chance to see.

Marvel comics are sitting right there,

the best-selling comic book in America at that time.

And certainly there must be movies to be made.

Well, there were, there would be.

But the first ones that came out

weren't the ones that anybody wanted to see

and they weren't the ones that

people were particularly proud of.

Everything DC Warner Brothers did right

Marvel did wrong.

Marvel hadn't a clue as to how to merchandise

its amazingly popular franchises.

Get in!

Come on, come on!

And they sold off a lot of their characters

to make quick money into movies

that were so ghastly that many of them weren't released.

While Marvel characters were failing

to successfully make the transition

to the big screen,

in the comics world they were still thriving,

and the industry itself was going through a boom-time.

Thanks to the growing maturity of the medium,

and to a significant shift in youth culture,

comics were suddenly selling in record numbers,

with new publishers

and new titles constantly being launched.

All these people

who had been in subcultures in the 1970s and 80s,

the Star Trek fans,

the punk fans, the goths,

the comic book fans,

had all existed in their own little cells

and they kind of knew about each other

but were afraid of the outside world

and the outside world didn't know much about them.

Then there was this explosion

into the mainstream in the 1990s.

Certainly you could see it in music.

Indie rock became alternative rock

as punk became grunge.

It was just this huge explosion.

Now that became popular.

Alternative became the thing to be.

I think that helped comic books and comic book fans

grow out of the dingy comic book stores

into a wider mainstream as well.

As this subculture pushed into the mainstream,

by the summer of 1992 Michael Keaton's Dark Knight

came to the fore once again inBatman Returns.

And having demonstrated his box office value

with the original,

this time director Tim Burton's imagination

was given free reign

in a far more eccentric take on the DC character.

Pitting Batman against the twin villainy

of Danny DeVito's Penguin

and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman,

it proved a far more divisive release.

Batman Returns was a case of

Tim Burton making a gothic fairytale

in the world of Batman.

And something that has always blown my mind

even when I first saw the film and I was 12 years old

is I'm thinking to myself,

if this film wasn't based on characters we all knew

it would be hailed as one of the great arthouse

whacked out fantasy movies of our day.

Eat your heart out, Terry Gilliam.

When I went to see it, I absolutely loved it.

First of all, the aesthetic was like nothing I'd seen before.

Certainly nothing in any kind of comic book world.

That gothic nature to it.

It was serious and dark,

but it wasn't bleak. It was still fun.

And for me, as a young teen at this point

and had never really felt as a female that

superheroes or comics were really for me

because in the era I grew up that wasn't something

that a lot of young women did.

So I didn't have a female superhero to idolize,

but what I did have is this amazingly cool woman

who falls out of the window and gets licked by cats

and turns into this incredibly sexy, sassy,

powerful, exciting anti-hero.

I've always been a huge fan of Catwoman.

Always. And to actually see her, not just on the big screen,

not just as a main character,

but actually even addressing the sexism,

that she deals with in the office,

something that seems so...

Well, we haven't quite fixed that.

But seeing her up there was huge

and she was powerful.

She was sexy, which, by the way, is fine.

I loved that costume.

I think it was incredible for a woman had to be sewn into it.

And she absolutely held her own against Batman.

I think it was incredible.

Miaow.

I think Batman Returns is a decent film

but it started kind of a trend in Batman films.

where the villains became more important than the hero.

Also two villains for the price of one.

That film for me feels less focused

as a Batman film

as it is an exploration of

these very strange characters

as seen through Tim Burton's eyes.

And these strange characters

and the sinister tone of the film

that they inhabited limited its wider appeal.

I was on Batman books

at the time Batman Returns came out.

And our sales went down,

because parents were so upset at the movie.

They expected to take the kids to see a Batman movie

you could take kids to see.

The Penguin material was so frightening

and Catwoman too was so disturbing.

that parents were outraged.

Despite a healthy opening box office,

the film suffered from a backlash,

forcing fast-food giant McDonalds

to pull a lucrative merchandizing deal.

Clearly never intended as a family-friendly movie,

Batman Returns proved too mature

for the summer blockbuster market.

But this didn't deter smaller studios

from investing in comic book adaptations,

and the boom in that industry meant

that there were now far more characters to choose from.

Independent publishers like Caliber, Dark Horse and Image

had created a wealth of new heroes,

and while Marvel was struggling

to get its characters on to the screen,

films likeThe Mask, Barb Wire andThe Crow

showcased these more modern creations.

The Crow was the first one

where you took a character the public did not know,

was not invested in it at all.

You had a relatively no name cast,

you had a low budget,

and it was this beautiful kick ass movie

and the soundtrack was amazing.

The production design was amazing,

and it was totally its own singular vision of something

that was totally faithful to the book as well.

For those people to make that kind of investment

in a movie on a book that no one knew about

I thought was amazing.

I think because those characters were new.

I think because The Crow was new.

The rights were much cheaper to obtain than Hollywood.

Timecopwas another film

where you could get an actor like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

who may not be the most fit person to play Timecop

but he worked in the film.

If you look at all those characters,

people who went to the cinema knew the actor

more than they did the character.

So it was very easy for the actor

to impose his persona or her persona

over the character themselves,

which helped to introduce the character to the audience.

Los Angeles, 1995.

It has taken three years for Warner Brothers to regroup,

rethink and reimagineBatman.

Reeling from the outrage

at Tim Burton's dark and singular previous outing,

this time they aim squarely at the family market.

Once again, the cast is an impressive ensemble,

with Val Kilmer replacing Michael Keaton

in the lead role,

Oscar-Winner Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face

and Hollywood's top comic actor,

Jim Carrey, as The Riddler,

alongside Nicole Kidman and Chris O'Donnell as Robin.

Behind the camera, ex-costume designer Joel Schumacher

aimed to bring a different vision to the series.

Yet the resultant film, Batman Forever,

although a commercial success,

would prove a creative dead end.

Once Tim Burton steps back,

what you're left with is,

do we build on what Tim has done

or do we go in a new direction?

There's still the influence and power of the memory

of theBatman television show.

So those are the three major directions you can go

with the franchise.

What no one considered was doing

what the comic books were doing,

because Hollywood's attitude towards comic books was,

OK, what's wrong with this thing?

How can we fix it and make it a movie?

Every time they pick up a comic book

their first thought is what are we going to get rid of?

With all these different forces at work

what happened next was Batman Forever.

It was loud, it was brash.

The imperatives were commercial

and there were a lot of one liners.

You called me here for this?

The Bat signal is not a beeper.

While I wish I could say my interest in you was...

...purely professional.

Are you trying to get under my cape, Doctor?

A girl can't live by psychosis alone.

It's the car, right? Chicks love the car.

By the time it got toBatman Forever,

we were still willing to go to see a Batman film.

That's when the Batman films started to slide off the rails.

Again we had two villains.

We had another actor in the Bat suit

who weren't unwilling to accept.

Val Kilmer seemed to sleepwalk through the role.

But he was upstaged by the villains.

Tommy Lee Jones' very Joker like turn as Two-Face.

Let's start this party with a bang.

It was a character who's not like the Joker.

And Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey.

I hope you made extra.

Who the hell are you?

Just a friend.

But you can call me...

...The Riddler.

It seems Schumacher wanted to impose

his own stylistic vision,

which I think is very much influenced

by the 1960s version.

Again, we went back to the skewed camera angles.

We got a neon approach,

rather than the day-glo colors of the Batman TV series.

Bat nipples. Need I go further?

Although more suitable

as family entertainment,

with McDonalds firmly back on board

for the merchandizing tie-in,

this was Batman back in the territory of camp parody

and comics fans and reviewers alike

voiced their disappointment.

When, in 1998, Schumacher returned

with yet another Batman,

George Clooney for the follow-up,

studio hopes were high for another smash hit.

Yet this star-studded spectacle

would become infamous,

regularly voted as one of the worst films ever made.

I don't want to be mean

but I feel like Schumacher single-handedly destroyed

the Batman movie franchise.

In his defense, I don't feel like it was entirely his fault.

I feel like Warner Brothers' lack of understanding

of the story and the characters

is why he got away with that interpretation.

But yeah, it's not good.

Hi Freeze. I'm Batman.

You're not sending me to the cooler.

Batman and Robin was the death knell

that would make people realize

you could not treat these movies like a t-shirt shop

and expect people to come in every summer.

I've heard Kevin Feige at Marvel refer to Batman and Robin

as the most important comic book move ever made

because it was so egregiously bad

that it signaled that anything was better than this.

So someone came up with the desperate idea

of actually paying attention to the source material

because now there was nothing else to be tried anyway

so we might as well try to do it the way they did it.

It would be years

before this new approach came to fruition.

In the meantime,

just as the Batman franchise crashed and burned,

a slump in comic book sales saw the entire industry

go from boom to bust almost overnight.

By the close of 1996,

industry leader Marvel filed for bankruptcy.

With the comics themselves

no longer able to keep it afloat,

its only hope lay in the motion pictures

that were currently in development

with film studios at the time,

and with their previous lack of success at the box office,

their chances seemed slim.

And then, in 1998, a film was released

focused on a Marvel character few were even aware of...

...Blade.

Blade was Marvel's first successful

cinematic theatrical entry in the comic book superhero world.

But for 99% of people going to that movie

it was, "Oh, it's a Wesley Snipes action-horror movie

where he plays a vampire and he kills vampires." Neat!

It's like a bad dream.

There are worse things out tonight than vampires.

Like what?

Like me.

It was surprising that Marvel's first cinematic hit

turned out to be Blade,

because even within comic book readers

Blade was an obscure character.

He appeared in the Marvel comic

"Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s.

Blade was a character

who was half vampire who hunted vampires.

Being able to describe the character

in two to three sentences is very important.

If you can do that then the audience can accept that.

I think the success of Blade was that

we had an established action star

or somebody who was on the rise as an action star

Wesley Snipes.

And we had a very fun vampire film.

It was probably one of the first films to capitalize

on what would later become the vampire zeitgeist,

minus the romance and sparkles of the twilight series.

You're one of them, aren't you.

No, I'm something else.

There's an interesting lesson in Blade.

The fact that the character was so relatively unknown.

There is no one that could say,

"Hm, I think it should be more like this."

If you put Superman or Batman on screen

it's almost like a Rorschach test.

You can ask any film executive

what they think a Superman movie should have

and they'll have an answer.

That's not necessarily a good thing.

Ask them what a Blade movie should be like, they don't know.

That could be a good thing.

I loveBlade.

I love the character of Blade.

I love the movie Blade and I love Wesley Snipes.

To make that kind of investment...

It was the same thing with The Crow

where you have an obscure character.

On paper it shouldn't work.

And at the time, especially then it shouldn't work

because there was nothing in the pop culture landscape

that would indicate that audiences were hungry

for a black vampire killer from Marvel comics.

A character that didn't even have his own book.

He was an ancillary character from another book.

The fact that they threw down, they made the investment

and they really made it work, I thought it was great.

I wish that movie got more love now

compared to a lot of the Marvel movies that have come out.

None of them would have happened without Blade.

Blade provided a glimmer of hope

during Marvel's darkest hour,

not just a success in its own right

but only one of a number of projects being developed

by different studios.

This last minute resurgence

couldn't have been better timed.

Over the previous decade

digital technology had been advancing

at an astonishing rate,

and this evolution had fed directly

into the cinematic world.

FromTerminator 2 andJurassic Park

toTitanic andStarship Troopers,

in the 1990s computer generated imagery, or CGI,

began to enable filmmakers

to realistically portray the previously unfilmable.

At the dawn of the new millennium,

a pioneering film emerged

that was inspired by the comic book form,

and it gave a true indication of the future of cinema.

What was the first great comic book movie

that signaled what the movies could do?

For me, it'sThe Matrix.

The Matrix is not a comic book adaptation.

I don't care. The Wachowskis came from

the universes of Jack Kirby and Neal Adams

and all the other great comic book people.

They were conversant.

They understood the physics of it.

They understood the wow factor of it.

They put it on the screen first.

That last scene in the first movie when Neo

launches himself into the sky...

Everybody in the theatre

that owned a box full of comics at home

had the same thought.

That's Superman. That's what is should look like.

That's what we've been wanting to see.

How come I've never seen that in a superhero movie?

Yet now the wait was over.

After years of sub-standard, low-budget films

failing to bring the Marvel universe to life,

in 2000 one of its flagship titles

made its transition to the big screen -

The X-Men.

Developed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,

it would become the biggest-selling comic

of the 1990s,

although initially it proved less successful...

The X-Men have a long

and convoluted history.

They started as one of the last teams

that Lee and Kirby created in the 1960s.

Their book got cancelled every five days

it seemed like through the 60s and 70s.

And then in the hands of Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum

they had this incredible resurgence.

The appeal of the title was simple.

A cool bunch of characters that had just been created

so it was totally virgin territory,

and the chance to work

with one of the best artists in the business, Dave Cockrum.

Spidey had been around for five years.

The FF had been.

Everyone else had continuity.

Everyone else had a clutch of writers

who'd come before

who defined the characters in the series.

This was virgin territory and it was irresistible.

The X-Men were very different

from Lee and Kirby's other creations.

Where their previous heroes had been normal people

transformed by exposure to cosmic rays

and radioactive spiders,

this was a team of mutants

who were born with their superpowers

and shunned by society.

During Claremont's 17-year tenure on the title,

their struggle proved particularly resonant

for an ever-growing number of readers.

The X-Men are like

comic book fans themselves.

They are a close-knit community of outcasts.

Within Marvel, there were the Spider-Man,

The Hulk, Daredevil fans

and then there were the X-Men fans

who would have liked the universe to themselves.

I knew some people who would read The X-Men

and wouldn't read other comic books.

They were totally immersed in the X-Men.

It was like punk rock fans.

We only to listen to punk.

We're not going to listen to anything else.

The X-Men had that kind of effect on comic books.

An X-Men film had been in development

since the early 90s,

when Terminator director James Cameron

was linked to the project,

and although 20th Century Fox

had obtained the rights in 1994,

they were unable to see

the true value of their acquisition.

Fox couldn't get a handle on the concept.

So I ended up writing a memo

to explain to them who are the X-Men,

what makes it different.

What I said was, this is not a story about superheroes.

It is about trying to make a place for yourself

in a world that frankly doesn't want you.

And you have to prove to them

we have value, we have a right to be here.

With The X-Men, it became mostly a story

about immigrants coming to America

and trying to fit in.

I have here a list of names

of identified mutants

living right here in the United States.

- Senator Kelly. - Now here's a girl in Illinois,

who can walk through walls.

Now, what's to stop her from walking into a bank vault?

or into the White House or into their houses?

- Senator Kelly! - There are even rumors,

Ms. Grey, of mutants so powerful

that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts,

taking away our God-given free will.

I think the American people deserve the right to decide

whether they want their children to be at school with mutants,

to be taught by mutants.

That is a more easily embraceable

or relatable concept

and unfortunately more real than,

it's the adventures of a billionaire

who wants to fight crime.

With acclaimed young director Bryan Singer

calling the shots,

anticipation for the movie ran high,

yet as withBatman a decade beforehand,

fans were anxious

regarding the casting of their favorite character,

the violent anti-hero Wolverine.

Initially Dougray Scott was cast in the role,

but was forced to back out,

and Singer returned to his original choice,

Russell Crowe.

Crowe too was unavailable, but he suggested his friend

and fellow Australian, Hugh Jackman, for the part,

an actor most known for his work in musical theatre.

And like Michael Keaton, he proved an inspired choice.

I think the success

of the X-Men films hinged on

the perfect casting of Wolverine.

There is no character probably more beloved

in the Marvel universe,

a character whose origins were shrouded in mystery

for the longest time.

That film lived and died

on Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine

in a way that fans could get behind.

Come on, buddy. This isn't going to work.

- I know what you are. - You lost your money.

You keep this up, you lose something else.

Look out!

Wolverine would not be part

of the pop culture landscape without Jackman.

The two are intrinsically tied to each other.

None of those movies would work without him.

He's so naturally charismatic

and he's handsome without being pretty

and he's manly without being brutish

and he sells the savagery of it.

They built this whole franchise

and this whole ensemble around him.

He was this unknown Aussie guy that came in from nowhere

to replace somebody and he made the whole thing.

Like Richard Donner'sSuperman,

director Singer assembled an ensemble cast,

including British heavyweights

Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen

and rising star Halle Berry.

And in keeping with the comic book,

the film brought a realistic, dramatic weight

to its fantastical premise.

The ambition of X-Men declared itself immediately.

The movie opens in a Nazi concentration camp

with a family being marched to their death.

This was not Ned Beatty making jokes in Metropolis

This was not Jack Nicholson mugging for the camera.

This was saying,

"We're going into the real world.

We're bringing the real world into this."

The film opened with $55 million

opening the weekend.

That was the fifth biggest opening of all time

and it was the biggest opening weekend ever for a non-sequel.

Because Bryan Singer didn't have a gazillion dollars

he had to put the emphasis on the drama

and the characters and the storytelling.

That's why that film still holds up, not as an action movie,

'cause there's very little action in it,

but it still works as a character drama.

Are you sneaking around in here, Charles?

Whatever are you looking for?

I'm looking for hope.

I will bring you hope, old friend.

And I ask only one thing in return.

Don't get in my way.

It's a much more grown up film

than its predecessors, in many ways

partly because it tackles big political issues.

I think it deliberately positioned itself

as not a film just for children,

not a film just for fans.

Something that is an origin story,

so you don't have to have read the comics.

But if you have read the comics

then you get all the joy

and delight of seeing all these people realized.

Particularly post-Matrix, the choice of the costumes

was very interesting.

So they don't go with the yellow Wolverine suit.

Everyone's wearing leather, everyone looks cool.

And again it was a cool film.

There were a lot of women in it.

WhenX-Men came out as a film

and you had this sort of 50-50 cast,

not only were you bringing in the guys

that were going to see it anyway.

You had a lot of women who wanted to go and see it too

because, hey, I want to go see kick ass chicks.

It was such a huge thrill to see that.

I know for a lot of people

seeing Batman on the big screen was a big deal.

But for me it was X-Men.

It was seeing all of these women fighting.

I loved that.

After its first faltering steps,

in the wake of X-Men

the superhero blockbuster was up and running.

Comic books were suddenly a popular source material

for a whole range of films,

and in the new millennium acclaimed works

such asGhost World

and the Oscar-winning Road to Perdition

took non-fantasy comics

and turned them into serious cinema.

In early 2002, the secondBlade film opened

and became another commercial

and critical success,

yet all eyes were focused on the Summer's big release.

After a short-lived TV series

and several successful cartoons,

Marvel's most well-known character

was making his way to the big screen...

The Amazing Spider-man was

one of the most amazing creations

in comic book history.

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko put together all the great parts

of superheroes.

They took a kid like Robin.

They took a family tragedy like Batman.

And they took an alter-ego like Superman.

And they put it all together.

And it just absolutely caught fire

because Spider-Man was the first comic book hero

with any gravitas who represented the readers.

The problem with Spider-Man

from a mass entertainment point of view

is you could do a couple of cartoons of him swinging

but he had these powers. He was acrobatic.

He jumped around. He shot his web shooters.

And there was a terrible television show in the 70s

and basically the problem was the technology was so poor.

until the magical creation of something called CGI.

More than anything, that's what bailed Marvel out -

the ability to portray their characters on film

in a way that looked credible and exciting

and would bring audiences into the multiplex.

Look, up there!

Save my baby, please!

I sit there on opening night, and I'm thinking,

this feels unreal, after all these years reading about it.

Like, I'm actually watching a Spider-Man movie!

Seeing Spider-Man swinging

across the screen for the first time

had as much of an impact on audiences

as seeing Christopher Reeve fly as Superman

for the first time.

It was such an important moment for fans of the comics.

And those fans were secure in the knowledge that,

for the first time,

a film adaptation was in the creative hands

of one of their own - director Sam Raimi.

I've a long history with Sam Raimi.

I think he's the perfect director for Spider-Man.

The main thing with Sam is he loves making movies.

And he loves Spider-Man.

He's a huge Spider-Man geek.

He's a huge comic geek.

Spider-Man, I know he loves it.

He came to that project

with a spirit that had not been seen before

by a filmmaker adapting a comic book.

As much as Richard Donner succeeded with Superman,

he didn't grow up immersed in Superman

the way Sam Raimi grew up

immersed in the stories of Stan Lee

and Steve Ditko and John Romita.

This is a guy that knew what mattered in Spider-Man

when he made his choices for the film.

They weren't processed through a Hollywood filter.

I think Sam Raimi is

the perfect choice to direct Spider-Man.

If you look at his body of work

from "Army of Darkness" to the Evil Dead films,

he's the kind of guy who appreciates the fun

in Spider-Man, the fun in comics.

We look at them with this gravitas

because they are heroes and they protect us

from world changing events.

But there is something inherently fun and exhilarating

about swinging through the canyons of New York City

with a spider line and just being a hero.

And in the role of this hero,

Sam Raimi turned down the studio's choice,

Freddie Prinz Jr. in favor of Tobey Maguire,

an actor who had won critical acclaim

in dramas Pleasantville,

The Ice Storm and Wonder Boys.

Marvel had a lot riding

on that first Spider-Man movie.

So it was extremely important who was cast as Spider-Man,

Peter Parker, and who was chosen as director.

I think the choice of Tobey Maguire was perfect.

Peter!

What's going on in there?

I'm exercising. I'm not dressed, Aunt May.

Well, you're acting so strangely, Peter.

OK, thanks.

He was Peter Parker.

He had the voice and the look.

That's what I always imagined Peter Parker to be.

It's perfect.

The film was the right movie

at the right place at the right time.

It was good.

It was a character driven drama.

It was focused on Peter Parker and his journey,

his grief over the death of his Uncle Ben,

his struggle to get through high school, college,

and eventually balance all that with being Spider-Man,

his unrequited love story with Mary Jane.

Like Batman, it showed that a film

based on a well-known beloved comic book character

could blow away all the old box office records.

The first film ever to make over $100 million

in its opening weekend,

Spider-Man was further proof that,

if done right, superheroes were box office gold.

And for the comic book industry,

these blockbusters were now bringing their characters

to an enormous global audience.

Television has exposed people to characters

they had no idea of what they were about.

Maybe they knew who they were,

but until they see the movie they don't understand them.

I remember seeing the first Spider-Man movie

the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie.

And when Uncle Ben dies the audience is all torn up.

- Stay back, stay back! - That's my uncle!

- What happened? - Car jacker. He's been shot.

We just called the paramedics. They're on their way.

Stay back!

Uncle Ben.

I've known this story since I was ten years old.

It obviously affected me when I read it.

But I never thought about it on a wider audience.

When Uncle Ben dies, the audience is devastated.

Whoa!

Here's where things change.

When you stay with the core of a comical creation

that I loved and millions of others loved,

translate that to film properly

you're going to make some money.

Aware of the potential profits,

the Hollywood machine now went into overdrive.

In the summer of 2003, The Hulk was released,

and withThe Fantastic Four and Daredevil film

already in production,

only six years after facing bankruptcy,

Stan Lee's creations were now the most in-demand properties

in the entertainment business.

The filmmakers suddenly realized there's a market

for films that are bigger than life

with colorful heroes

with wonderful special effects

and obviously where can you get better things than that

than in comics, especially in Marvel Comics.

The Hulk was

the second Marvel Comics creation

between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 60s.

Again, in terms of archetypes, who is he?

He is Frankenstein,

with Jekyll and Hyde kind of mixed in.

The skinny doctor who gets bombarded by gamma rays

and turns into this hulking brute

and he has no interest in defending civil liberty

or civil virtues or America in any way.

He's utterly out for himself.

The Incredible Hulk

was Marvel's first big television success

in the late 70s and early 80s.

It was well-acted and it took the same sort of theme

as The Fugitive, the 60s TV show,

and there was a tragic theme about it

which I think was true to the comic book.

He was a different kind of superhero -

somebody who didn't want the powers that he had.

And the TV show, even though, comic book fans

had a lot to quibble with,

I think it was very successful for its medium for its time.

But translating The Hulk into the big screen

of course you wanted more than that.

Now you could have a bigger Hulk, a much stronger Hulk,

truer to the comic books.

But being true to the comic books

wasn't the primary intention

for the creative team behind 2003's Hulk.

Award-winning Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee

was the most critically acclaimed

and internationally celebrated director

ever to take on a superhero adaptation.

His film was more interested in psychology than action,

its script steeped in allusions

to literary classics and mythology.

I loved Hulkin 2003. I loved it.

If I hadn't wanted to go see the film

because I watched the TV show, which I did,

so I already loved Hulk,

I would have gone because of the director.

At that point, it was pretty obvious

that comic book films were going to keep going.

And so I think it was a really interesting choice

to take a director like Ang Lee and say,

"Here is a big, green guy who wears purple pants.

Do what you want with him."

The gamma's too high.

Bruce, I can't stop it.

Harper, get out!

Get out!

The idea of somebody like Tim Burton

doing a comic book film made sense to people.

Ang Lee. You're like, wait, what now?

But I think that sort of gave

a little more of a footing to comic book movies

for people who might have dismissed them as kids' stuff.

The Hulk is very much an Ang Lee picture.

But it's also super duper comic booky visually

in terms of the use of panels as editing devices,

the really bright primary colors,

the unapologetic larger-than-life action.

No!

But it was a flop.

I think that was another case of audiences

not embracing a very arthouse drama

that was disguised as a comic book movie.

And I think again, like withBatman Returns,

the lesson that Hollywood took from that is like

bring in great directors

but don't let them go completely crazy.

Its ambition was commendable

when compared to the rash of films that followed.

With the Ben Affleck vehicle Daredevil,

the second big screen outing ofThe Punisher

and a tepid, family-friendly Fantastic Four,

the run of Marvel-based hits came to an end,

whereas theCatwoman solo feature film

starring Halle Berry quickly made its way

into worst-film- of-all-time lists.

Yet sequels kept the superhero flag flying,

with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 and Bryan Singer's X2

hailed as amongst the very best of the genre.

Spider-Man 2 is widely considered

one of the greatest sequels,

especially in superhero movies.

The special effects had moved on that bit more again.

Even in just those couple of years

between films they're developing,

they're getting that bit more weight to them.

And they are just pushing what they can do with them.

Particularly with the Dr. Octopus character

and all these kind of extendable limbs.

It has some of the stand-out set pieces still

in terms of superior cinema, from that fight on the train

and when they're fighting on the side of the building.

It just gets that stuff so right.

It's just hugely entertaining.

In terms of being faithful to the source,

X2 was probably the high watermark at that time

for basically a comic book come to life.

X2 feels like a trade paperback all in one sitting.

The first 50 minutes of X2, the first act, I still think

is some of the best comic book cinema ever made.

Don't shoot!

It gets even more political in X2

and it gets darker.

Nightcrawler was a fantastic character

and his early sequences in the White House,

absolutely showcases CGI - were very funny, very cool.

And actually really not like things we had seen before.

X2 was the one that showed

they really can do everything.

They were just using their powers all the time

without giving it a second thought.

And not only are the special effects terrific,

they feel seamless. They feel like...

...they're unstrained in a narrative sense.

And that's why I'm thinking they're going "wow".

This is it. We've done it.

And as advances in technology

helped transport superheroes to the big screen,

they also helped bring

comic book aficionados closer together.

Where the only forum for readers

had previously been letters pages

and the comic book store itself,

with the coming of the digital age,

once isolated fans embraced the Internet

and reached out to others who shared their passion.

Of course, the Internet did so much

to propel and explode fan culture

for comic books and all kinds of fan obsession.

If you were a fan of these comic books,

you felt kind of alone.

You know are there other people out there

other than just a handful of friends who are into this.

What the Internet did with the message boards,

now it creates this broad international community

where you can comment on every comic book or superhero.

You can actually help to shape the comic books

because the writers, the artists,

would hear about this too.

The message board culture of the late 90s and early 2000s,

you were able to bridge a gap

between the fans and the creatives

and the artist and the writers were more accessible.

You could have conversations and dialogue with them

and fans were able to connect

and talk about what they loved or what they didn't love

about movies or comics or whatever it may be.

So we started to see,

due to the Internet and online communities,

the explosion of fan culture

which ultimately I think has led

to there being as many conventions

and fan conventions as there are today.

Comic book culture has become more fan culture.

Just people getting together and celebrating what they love.

The opening years of the new millennium

were notable for the explosion

of beloved Marvel characters

onto the big screen for the first time.

2005, however, was the year

in which the Dark Knight once again returned.

Looking to wipe the slate clean

after the extravagance and incoherence

of the Joel Schumacher years, Warner Brothers turned to

young, celebrated British director

Christopher Nolan to start the series anew,

withBatman Begins.

And in telling this story,

the creative team of Nolan and David S. Goyer,

the writer behind theBlade franchise,

looked directly to the comic books -

in particular Frank Miller's seminal origin story

Batman: Year One

and the pioneering output of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams

in the 1970s.

Christopher Nolan did

something rather remarkable and simple.

He was the first major filmmaker

to tell the story of, as they said in 1940,

who Batman is and how he came to be.

It's the first origin film of Batman.

Batman's origin is just tremendous.

It's so emotional and so effective

and so effectively done by Chris Nolan

that almost that decision alone

gave him three quarters of his movie.

Chris Nolan approached these movies

almost like a John Ford or Howard Hawks.

As a single relentless avenger

trying to find out who he is and what he's about.

The work that Denny and I had done

influenced that first movie,

and you could see it right on the screen.

Of the DC movies that had been made,

that first of those three,

just killer, it's a killer movie.

The achievement ofBatman Begins

can't be underestimated.

Christopher Nolan's a brilliant filmmaker.

Start with that.

And watch the movie unfold the way he tells the story.

The use of practical effects in camera

to get away from CGI whenever possible

not because it's a financial issue

but because of the aesthetic issues

and you've got a street level version of Batman

that everybody in the world

except perhaps Joel Schumacher was ready for.

LikeSuperman and X-Men before it,

Batman Begins featured an abundance

of acting talent to portray major roles.

Alongside acclaimed but little-known British actor

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne,

were Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman

and many other esteemed actors

in one of the most impressive ensemble casts ever assembled.

This leant the film considerable dramatic weight,

and upon its release,

it immediately set a new benchmark

for superhero cinema.

Batman Beginsblew my mind when it came out.

I knew who Christian Bale was

so I was excited to see what he did with it.

But I had no idea.

And I knew some Nolan stuff

But I didn't know it was going to be that.

He was so good and the story was so dark

and so grounded in reality.

That was a whole new thing for comic book movies.

A storm's coming.

The scum is getting jumpy because you stood up to Falcone.

It's a start.

Commission Loeb set up a massive task force to catch you.

He thinks you're dangerous.

What do you think?

I think you're trying to help.

But I've been wrong before.

Nolan wasn't a huge comic geek.

And he wasn't coming at it from the point of view of some fan

who got his chance to make what he wanted.

He was looking at it like a serious dramatic filmmaker

who had an opportunity to take this thing

and make it real.

Nolan's Batmans were the first time

that someone approached superhero mythology

as a legitimate dramatic narrative.

I give Warners and Nolan a lot of credit for committing

to the degree that they did to bring that real

'cause I think there's a whole generation of people

that that's their version of Batman.

It was defining.

Batman Begins helped to bring

a new level of respect

both to superhero films and to comic books themselves.

The year of its release, 2005,

also saw comic book adaptations

compete for the first time at Cannes,

the most prestigious international film festival.

Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez

andA History of Violence,

by veteran Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg,

continued in the tradition of earlier films

Road to Perdition and Ghost World

in demonstrating that comic books were an artform

to be taken seriously.

The things that came out

that weren't superhero based

really showed a lot of people who don't read comics

that it was more than guys in Spandex.

I think it made people take the medium more seriously.

That it wasn't just the pulp stories.

That it was that you could tell a really beautiful narrative

and you had another layer to it.

You had the visuals.

The urgency of truly high quality comic books

starts coming across.

Road to Perdition, in particular,

I think it's fantastic that people don't know

that's based on a comic book. I love to tell them and say,

"Oh, it's a very faithful adaptation as well."

You see them scratch their heads.

That doubt of their sense of what a comic book is

is what led to all the great things that have happened since.

Yet in the years immediately following

the release of Batman Begins, the genre still seemed shaky.

Marvel adaptations continued to flounder,

with Elektra, Ghost Rider and a Fantastic Four sequel

all receiving a lukewarm reception,

while third films in proven series

X-Men and Spider-Man disappointed fans.

Behind the scenes, however,

Marvel was looking to take its fate into its own hands.

In the 90s Marvel was licensing its properties

to a variety of different studios.

So, for example, Paramount had Iron Man,

Thor, Captain America,

I think it might have had Black Panther at the time.

Fox had the X-Men universe of course.

Sony had Spider-Man, Universal had The Hulk.

But in the mid-2000s, led by a guy called David Maisel

Marvel decided they would try and employ

a different model of movie-making.

Maisel suggested that Marvel develop

and produce films in-house,

become a production company in its own right

and maintain creative and financial control

over its own properties.

It was a risky move,

as it required the company to secure substantial funding,

yet Marvel pressed forward,

with the rights to only a handful

of its more prominent characters.

In 2007, they moved into production,

and under the stewardship of David Maisel

and Marvel producer Kevin Feige,

soon announced their upcoming plans to the press.

I had published a story

that was on the front page of the LA Times business section.

It had a picture of the Hulk and Thor and Iron Man.

This was before the first Iron Man film.

And the headline was "The B-Team".

This was notX-Men,

the best-selling comic book in America.

This was notSpider-Man.

These characters weren't as well-known.

But there's nothing wrong with being an unknown

as long as you make a good first impression.

In 2008, the pressure

for that first impression

fell on the shoulders of Iron Man

and his alter ego Tony Stark,

the hero who would front

the debut release from Marvel Studios.

Like Blade a decade beforehand,

once again this was a character

with little audience recognition,

although comic book readers

had been following his adventures

since Stan Lee created him back in 1963.

When Marvel got into

its second-tier characters

comic book fans, of course, knew who they were

but the broader audience didn't.

In advance of the Iron Man film coming out

there was a big publicity campaign

to make sure that people knew he wasn't a robot.

Of course, comic book fans already knew that.

Iron Man's an interesting character and very timely.

He was a character born

as the United States was getting ready

to go to war in Vietnam.

He was a character that came out

of the military industrial complex.

Tony Stark working as a defense contractor

with the government, wounded in Vietnam,

and builds this Iron Man suit

because he's so brilliant with technology.

That's easily adapted to our own age

where the United States is in Vietnam-like wars,

in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time.

Once again we had this tension between

trying to master this technology

but yet someone who feels apart from that as well.

He's still part of that military industrial complex.

But he makes it clear that

he's going to turn attention elsewhere and help people.

I saw young Americans killed

by the very weapons I created to defend and protect them.

And I saw that I...

...had become part of a system

that is comfortable with zero accountability.

What happened over there?

I had my eyes open.

I came to realize that I had more

to offer this world

than just making things to blow up.

That is why, effective immediately,

I am shutting down the weapons manufacture...

For a technology obsessed culture

you really can't get a better superhero than Iron Man

to play to these tensions,

this love-hate or love-fear relationship

that we all have with technology.

Jarvis, are you there?

At your service, sir.

Gaugeheadsupdisplay.

Check.

All preferences from home interface.

Will do, sir.

I know Iron Man was sort of risky

because people didn't know who that character was.

But I was really excited and the reason was...

...I feel that with something like Batman or Captain America

there was this feeling that you're not going to do it right.

You're going to mess up my Captain America, my Batman.

Where Iron Man, because a lot of people didn't know who he was,

you could go in and pretty much do anything you want.

So it was a brilliant move.

If you're going to launch a cinematic universe

that is completely unique,

you got to do it with somebody that no one knows.

But casting somebody no one knows

was not an option.

Bringing on board a familiar actor

to play Tony Stark

was crucial to the film's success

Marvel approached Robert Downey Jr. for the role.

An Oscar-winning actor who had emerged in the 1980s

and whose career had been derailed

by substance abuse issues

and imprisonment the following decade,

by the time of Iron Man

his career was on the rise once again,

and he proved the perfect choice.

This is the role of a lifetime for him.

A lot of people thought Chaplin was.

I think this guy was born to be Tony Stark.

Robert's grown up in the public eye.

Everything good and bad that's happened in his life

everybody's seen.

And Tony Stark is a guy who's also grown up in the public eye.

He's a genius. Everybody appreciates his talent.

It made sense to have

Robert Downey Jr. do this.

He has a history with substance abuse

and Iron Man has a history with substance abuse.

Robert Downey Jr. had gone through some stuff.

He was still a well-respected actor

but his career wasn't flourishing the way it is now.

So I think what he did for Iron Man,

Iron Mandid for him.

Tony Stark is a brilliant character.

In a way he's sort of comparable to Batman

in the sense that he is a multi-millionaire

and he's a genius.

But that was part of the appeal

because the darkness in Batmanis fantastic

and that works for him.

But what worked for Iron Man is he was really funny.

- Hello, Tony. Remember me? - Sure don't.

You cast Robert Downey Jr.

who had famously had his own problems

who's not a teenager.

There was no way anyone thought

that movie was only for kids.

It took on big themes.

It had scenes set in Afghanistan.

It had Jeff Bridges in it.

There's a lot going on in that movie.

Iron Man was successfully sold

as a comic book superhero movie

to people that otherwise might be embarrassed

to go to a comic book superhero movie.

It had adult movie stars.

Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges.

This was almost a prestigious comic book picture.

right alongside Batman Begins.

It comes out beginning of May,

shocks everyone by doing $102 million

on opening weekend.

Second biggest opening for a non-sequel ever

beyond Spider-Man.

That Monday Marvel comes out and said,

"OK, here's what we're doing next."

Marvel publicly announced

an ambitious production slate

that aimed to release solo films

for all of its key characters,

culminating in a team film The Avengers.

And while its other release of 2008,The Incredible Hulk,

proved less successful than Iron Man,

the studio was confident it could bring superheroes

to the screen like never before.

As Marvel enjoyed the first of many successes,

DC's frontrunner returned to movie theatres once again.

And whereBatman Begins had created a new benchmark

for comic book adaptations,

The Dark Knight was a far bleaker sequel

that saw Christopher Nolan

continue to push the boundaries

of fantasy cinema

and brought Batman's arch-nemesis the Joker

back onto the big screen.

This role would be immortalized

by Australian actor Heath Ledger,

who died just months before the film's release.

The darkness of The Dark Knight,

was fairly surprising. It really went to places that

maybe you'd expect a crime thriller to go to

more than a comic book movie.

But I think that had been seeded in Batman Begins

taking this much more realistic and gritty approach

to the character, setting it in a Gotham

that felt much more like a crime-ridden city

than a comic book metropolis.

People were really excited to see a Batman-Joker story

set in that world

with the cool casting of Heath Ledger

as a pretty creepy looking Joker.

Keep in mind the preview came out before he died

so we already had a decent idea

of what kind of Joker he would be.

You see, this is how crazy Batman's made Gotham.

If you want order in Gotham,

Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in.

Oh, and every day he doesn't, people will die.

There was a lot of interest in it

because it was Heath Ledger's final complete role on film.

He was obviously an actor of interest.

He was Oscar nominated for Brokeback Mountain,

so he was someone who was clearly taken seriously

butThe Dark Knight showed him

in a completely different light.

I genuinely believe that if he hadn't died,

people would have still been as blown away

and interested in that performance.

Come on, come on. I want you to do it.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on, come on. I want you to do it.

Come on, hit me. Come on, hit me!

Hit me!

You just don't see many performances like that,

especially in terms of villains in superhero films

that are kind of so intense.

It clearly dug so deep into that character

and was really quite terrifying.

And that's obviously one of the main things

that people remember and love about The Dark Knight,

Heath Ledger's performance.

If Stanley Kubrick had lived long enough

to do a superhero movie

it would have been The Dark Knight.

It was the first time that someone committed

to the resources you'd need

to take comics out of the pop culture class.

It wasn't an amazing comic book flick.

It was an amazing movie

that happened to be about a comic book character.

And there's a big difference.

The performances are amazing.

And the caliber of talent he would surround himself

to do those films is staggering.

With a director like Nolan,

producing these incredibly cinematic movies,

it's not that surprising

that these were really the first superhero movies

that were seriously considered for awards glory.

Heath Ledger was awarded the Oscar for his performance

after he'd died.

Although none of those movies were nominated for Best Picture,

there was a bit of an outcry that they should be -

why shouldn't we take these,

not only seriously within their own worlds,

but why shouldn't this be taken seriously as a piece of cinema?

And following the success of Iron Man

and The Dark Knight,

comic book adaptations spread like a hurricane

through popular culture.

Studios desperately raced

to find new characters and titles

to bring to the big screen,

while Iron Man returned for a successful sequel

and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was pulled from the wreck

of the X-Men series

to star in his own cinematic adventures.

Having signed a lucrative buyout deal

with Disney in 2011,

Marvel Studios returned with the next two installments

of its cinematic canon.

The first of these to be released was Thor,

and like Iron Man this represented

the character's big screen debut.

Thor is a god of thunder

who has this enormously powerful weapon of mass destruction

that only he can pick up

because he is the only person worthy of lifting this burden.

I think that Marvel comics,

with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby again,

were able to tap into this other realm of gods that

we don't really study in Western culture.

We have our Greeks and our Romans

but the Norse gods are very cool.

A god of thunder who makes thunder with a hammer

and can shoot lightning bolts.

That's something we hadn't seen before.

Despite the character's longevity in the comics world,

he again seemed a risky prospect

for a wider audience.

Yet Marvel Studios, and its mastermind,

President of Production Kevin Feige,

were confident that they could makeThor a hit.

With veteran British actor and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh

on board to direct the project,

they even altered their tried-and-tested formula

and cast unknown Australian actor

Chris Hemsworth to portray this equally unfamiliar hero

Just the idea that you have Norse mythology

with Shakespearean prose

in this fantastical, crazy Jack Kirby on acid world.

I remember when they announced the movie.

I was like, "How the hell are they going to...?"

Everything else is so grounded in reality

and Thor is this one thing

that I just couldn't see how it would fit.

When I first sat down with the Marvel folk

they said, "This is the most difficult property we have.

We have so many ways to fail doing this."

I thought, "Well, that's great, good start."

But when I looked this up it said, what's the genre?

It said, action, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, drama.

That's a lot of categories, isn't it?

I said, "I think it has all those things in the comics.

The biggest challenge is tone."

Thor potentially on paper

is quite a difficult sell.

And it is certainly stretching the realms of believability.

While you've set up Iron Man with this real world guy

who is looking at real world issues

and is set in a very real world way

and it's very serious,

it's like, and now we're going to have a Norse god -

is quite a difficult sell.

What it did expertly is it was really funny.

- This drink, I like it. - I know, it's great, right?

Another!

Sorry. It was a little accident.

- What was that? - It was delicious.

- I want another. - You could have just said so.

- I just did. - No, I mean ask, nicely.

- I meant no disrespect. - Alright, no more smashing.

Deal?

You have my word.

Essentially, it's a brilliant fantasy

fish out of water comedy

and didn't take itself seriously at all.

Chris Hemsworth was the perfect choice.

So is this how you normally look?

More or less.

It's a good look.

Given how off the rails

Thor could have been,

I thought they did a great job.

And Hemsworth too.

That guy's no joke as an actor.

Like, yeah, he's big and yoked and pretty and everything.

That guy's really good, because that's a thankless role.

That could have been so ridiculous and so stupid.

Although less successful than Iron Man,

Thor proved another box office draw,

and anticipation was now running high

for Marvel's other big release of 2011,

Captain America: The First Avenger.

And this character was the oldest Superhero

in the company's repertoire,

a propaganda symbol dating back to the early 1940s

and America's entrance into the Second World War.

Captain America, for my money,

is the most underrated character of them all.

He was forged in the crucible of World War II.

He was the first major patriotic character.

He emerged from the hand of Joe Simon

and the inks of Jack Kirby

and he was the guy who was going to fight the Nazis

and whip them six ways to Sunday.

The most ingenious idea

was the fact that Stanley revived him

after all these other characters had come out in the early 1960s

in The Avengers comic book.

And he reintroduced him

in a state of suspended animation.

He brought him back and Captain America had spent 20 years

outside of American society.

He famously lost Bucky, his companion.

He thought he could have saved him.

He's become Hamlet.

He's become the superhero as Hamlet.

He has an existential crisis.

Remaining true to Stan Lee's concept,

Captain America: The First Avenger

was an origin story

set primarily during the second world war,

and introduced audiences to the character

before his present day revival.

With another relative unknown

playing Captain America, Chris Evans,

and action director Joe Johnston at the helm,

despite wider public recognition

of the title character,

once again the film was no sure-fire hit.

Upon its release it proved divisive.

When I first heard

they were going to have a Captain America movie,

I was concerned

because he has in the past been rather cheesy.

And he was created as a propaganda thing.

So I feel like, especially with a red, white and blue outfit,

that's hard to do.

I think the first film really sold that.

It was very clear that he was created,

that this costume was created.

It wasn't his idea to wear it.

I think if they hadn't done that,

a lot of the movie would have failed.

You know, the longest time I dreamed about...

...coming overseas and being on the frontline,

serving my country,

trying to get everything I wanted...

...and I'm wearing tights.

In some ways, Captain America is

the Superman of the Marvel universe

in the sense that he's this patriotic hero,

this all American guy.

But his story is arguably not as interesting

and certainly in the first Captain America movie

which many would argue

is one of the weakest of the MCU films,

it was already a difficult concept to get on board with,

particularly coming on the heels of Tony Stark

who was such an interesting, flawed hero.

A guy who's just nice and wants to serve his country

didn't feel like something easy to identify with.

Strangely for me, the first half of the movie,

so the period setting, was actually more enjoyable

when here was this weedy little guy

who really wanted to do his best

and hanging out with Peggy and Bucky.

Later when he becomes this square-jawed

fairly boring, dare I saw it, guy

it didn't really work.

For me, it wasn't until Captain America

comes and blows my socks off

then I go, "OK, now I'm on board.

This movie's awesome."

This is the best working story movie since...

It's up there with Batman Begins, Spider-Man, Superman,

This is what I wanted out of a Marvel comic book movie.

It is a full-fledged, uncompromised

World War II action adventure movie.

I was never more excited for The Avengers

that I was walking out of Captain America.

Although both Thor and Captain America

had fallen short of the huge box office success

of Iron Man,

their 2011 output suggested

that Marvel Studio's audacious plan

was developing smoothly.

And this was not simply a Superhero movie craze -

another of the summer's tent-pole releases,

a big budget outing for DC's Green Lantern,

proved a significant critical and commercial failure.

But Marvel was playing by its own rules.

Its multi-film strategy, which would become known

as the Marvel Cinematic Universe,

saw each individual release

function as an installment of a larger connected series,

with actors signed on to portray the same character

in a large number of films.

So you're gearing up for your... obviously a spin off.

For Avengers or... what?

I got a nine-picture deal. I mean you know...

You guys know more about the news than I do.

I got a nine-picture deal.

Eventually, I want to make all nine of them

or they're gonna kill me.

If Marvel could pull it off,

this connected universe would be

a revolutionary achievement.

And not only was the strategy unique,

the studio was also approaching superhero cinema

in a fresh way.

Previously the creative drive behind many adaptations

was brought by distinctive directors -

from Tim Burton and Ang Lee

to Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan -

all of whom offered their own interpretations

of the source material.

Marvel's vision was in the hands

of President of Production Kevin Feige, however,

and the filmmakers brought on board

were expected to serve

as part of a much larger project.

They're bringing in people

who are invisible hands.

If you're into film, you'd go, "Oh, I see this touch here."

Or, "That's so Shane Black."

But the audience doesn't see that.

You can't look at it and go, that's a Shane Black film.

Whereas in a Tim Burton film,

you look at one frame and go, "I think that's Tim Burton."

They've brought in invisible hands.

People like Jon Favreau Joe Johnston, guys like that

who know how to deal with... how to get it done.

How to get it done on time. How to work with a cast.

There's not going to be any problems.

Everything in the screenplay is going to go on the film.

It's going to be storyboarded, all kinds of control.

But I think that's it.

It's just plain old craft, that's what it is.

These guys know how to make entertaining movies.

The greatest test of this ambitious project

came in the Spring of 2012.

Having established their core characters

in successful solo films,

Marvel Studios brought these heroes together

inThe Avengers.

Upon its release it broke box-office records worldwide,

and became the highest- grossing superhero film

of all time.

They built it film by film.

They went from strength to strength.

As each film was successful, they began building.

But the game plan of building all these disparate films,

to have the characters meet again in the big blockbuster,

that's never been done before. It's brilliant.

And it's offering the audience

a level of consistency they haven't seen.

Well, they can't get it anywhere else.

The thing that they've done

with the interconnected universe is mind-boggling.

The fact that they got... that The Avengers were on film,

I still can't believe it. It's been years since it...

I still can't believe they pulled that off.

The first Avengers film was brilliant.

At the time, I don't think I'd ever really felt

such buzz in the cinema about how this was going to work.

We weren't sure to be honest whether it was going to work.

Certainly for people who were fans comic books,

I think it was an absolute joy

to finally see these guys sharing a screen together

and they were more than the sum of their parts.

So together they were better than they were as individuals.

And the Avengers even saw Marvel triumph

with a character who had previously struggled

to cross over to movie audiences.

As the film's cast were greeted

like rockstars at premieres worldwide,

amongst them was Mark Ruffalo,

the latest in a long line of actors

to portray Dr. Bruce Banner and his alter ego, the Hulk.

I think the Hulk found a home.

You could say the whole arc of the history of the Hulk

since 1962 was, "Where will the Hulk belong?"

Where the Hulk belonged, surprise, surprise

was in The Avengers movies,

because it wasn't just him hogging up the whole screen.

He really played off these other characters.

Mark Ruffalo's rendition of Bruce Banner was terrific.

When you didn't need the Hulk, you could kind of send him away.

But when you needed him, he was very effective.

Dr. Banner...

Now might be a really good time for you to get angry.

That's my secret, Captain...

I'm always angry.

The idea to me of, 'high school jocks' and the popular kids

and really anyone other than 'the nerd demographic',

grabbing their buddies together

and racing out on opening night to see a movie where Thor

and Captain America and Iron Man fend off an alien invasion

was mind-boggling to me.

And that is unquestionably Marvel's greatest success

is that they took these B-level characters,

comparatively B-level characters,

and made them into A-level superstars.

While the Marvel Universe

was finally being revealed in all its glory,

another Superhero series was ready

to unveil its final installment.

With audiences still reeling

from the impact of The Avengers,

two months later

The Dark Knight Rises was released.

With Christian Bale taking on the mantle of the Bat

for the last time,

he faced off against fellow British actor

Tom Hardy as Bane, a lesser-known Batman villain

created by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan,

who had previously appeared in 1998's Batman and Robin.

Bane comes off a lot better in Dark Knight Rises

than he did in Batman and Robin.

He's not a mindless henchman.

They present him as a mastermind.

They present him as a bad-ass

which is one of the most important things.

He's smart and he's a bad-ass.

Bane!

Let's not stand on ceremony here...

...Mr. Wayne.

Patience has cost you your strength.

Victory has defeated you.

They made him a household name.

Everybody knows who he is now,

which I'm still getting my head around.

You know Graham Nolan and I are like, wow.

You know, we just came up with a crazy idea,

and here it is in toys, in key chains

and pajamas and Halloween costumes, everything.

Released in July 2012,

with an unfamiliar villain and Heath Ledger's performance

as the Joker still fresh in moviegoers' memories,

this closing chapter in Christopher Nolan's trilogy

had a lot to live up to...

There is the issue that The Joker

was such an impactful presence inThe Dark Knight

that you're inevitably going to miss that side in the next film.

You obviously kind of want to see him again.

And who knows,

if things hadn't gone the way they did with Heath Ledger,

who knows what would have happened in the third film.

But one of the things I really do like about it is,

it's one of these rare superhero films,

which we just may never see again,

that actually has an ending.

It has a neat, wrapped up ending

that you can feel like that was where it was going

fromBatman Begins.

You actually get quite an emotional pay-off, I think.

I never cared who you were.

Then you were right.

Shouldn't the people know the hero who saved them?

A hero can be anyone.

Even a man who does something

as simple and reassuring

as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders

to let him know the world hadn't ended.

Bruce Wayne.

Nolan stuck to his guns

and did what he wanted to do.

He made a successful arc, the arc he wanted to tell.

It felt consistent, it looked great.

Even though as a standalone,

I don't think it's as strong as the other two films.

As a set, I think it will absolutely

stand up to the test of time.

Christopher Nolan's Batman series may be the high point

of this balance between,

the filmmaker, working high cinema art,

combining, reconciling that with what fans want to see.

I think that accomplished it about as well as films could.

I don't think any comic book fan could be disappointed

with the Christopher Nolan films.

And I think any cinema fan,

recognizes the quality of what he's doing

even if they had never read the comic books themselves.

In the wake of these

two billion dollar grossing behemoths,

superheroes took over the world.

Comic book culture fully exploded into the mainstream,

merchandise flooded into every conceivable store,

convention attendances soared

and no one had to hide their passion

like a guilty pleasure anymore.

As The X-Men and Spider-Man series saw reboots

that sought to revive these franchises

after unpopular third installments,

Marvel Studios' cinematic output powered ever onwards.

With Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World

and Captain America: Winter Soldier

all opening to critical praise

and ever-increasing box office returns,

the spotlight soon fell upon Kevin Feige.

As the success of the interconnected universe

became ever more apparent,

the press celebrated the mastermind

behind the curtain.

For me it was the notion of reading the Marvel comics

and not knowing who would appear in what

because they all exist in the same universe.

And obviously that hadn't been done before

and now that once Marvel...

We started making our own movies and we had the entire library.

I thought, wouldn't it be fun to start doing that?

It's very smart.

The irony for me is that it's just the Marvel universe.

It's the same Marvel universe

that Stan Lee created in the 1960s.

And the genius of Kevin Feige is that he just went,

"Well, Stan and Jack and Steve figured it out in the 60s.

Why mess around with it?"

He's like the Steve Jobs of movies.

And I think history is going to be very kind to that guy,

when you have the ability to look back at what he's done

in its entirety because we're still in the middle of it.

I don't think audiences can really appreciate

the magnitude of what that guy's built.

It's staggering.

With comic book characters

dominating popular culture,

in 2013 Warner Brothers and DC looked to revive

the original blockbuster superhero.

With a story by theBatman Begins team

of Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer,

director Zach Snyder behind the camera

and young British actor Henry Cavill in the lead role,

Man of Steel sought to bring Superman into the modern age.

And despite some negative reactions,

its commercial performance convinced Warners

to press ahead with plans for a sequel.

Yet the success of The Avengers

and Marvel's interconnected universe

had sent shockwaves through the film industry,

and conventional blockbuster franchises

no longer seemed so attractive.

Hollywood gets the idea that

because The Avengers did so well,

they all should be chasing cinematic universes.

and I think that's the negative impact of The Avengers.

One that we're still feeling today,

one that I think may eventually have terrible repercussions

for theatrical movie-going overall.

Because we really don't have any evidence,

we don't have much evidence

that audiences actually want these cinematic universes

as opposed to they like The Avengers.

Man of Steelmay have been intended at the time

as a stand alone Superman picture,

but between Man of Steelbeing greenlit

and The Avengers making a billion and a half dollars,

they go, yeah, we're going to eventually make this

into what we now know is the DC films universe

for better or worse.

With Christian Bale's Dark Knight

still fresh in audiences' memories,

Warners nevertheless looked to bring the character

into the world of Man of Steel,

and aBatman v Superman project was quickly announced

as the next in a series of films

that would include big screen outings for Wonder Woman,

Aquaman and other members of DC's Justice League.

And without a Kevin Feige pulling the strings

and ensuring coherence,

the studio looked to director Zack Snyder

to drive the creative vision

for this interconnected universe.

Casting Ben Affleck as a new Caped Crusader

and introducing Gal Gadot

as the first big screen Wonder Woman,

upon its release, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

came under fire from audiences and critics alike.

When you look at the DC films,

certainly there is a lot of Zack Snyder coming into it.

Zack Snyder, who directed Watchmen,

the first real nihilistic take on superheroes -

superheroes who are faced with not winning,

the unwinnable situation.

With Man of Steel and Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice

those films have gone down a dark road

because we don't believe in the heroes.

Next time they shine your light in the sky

don't go to it.

The Bat is dead, buried.

Consider this mercy.

Tell me...

Do you bleed?

I've wanted to see Batman and Superman

fight since I was a little kid. That's so cool.

I should have gone crazy over this movie.

But I feel like it was just too processed.

I think we've gone too far with the gritty.

I think there wasn't any sense of fun about this movie.

It just felt like Superman was depressed

and Batman was angry and then they fought.

Then Wonder Woman comes in and she's great.

Then, we're all angry again and everyone's depressed.

It's just all dark and it feels dreary.

Dawn of Justice is a bad film

and part of the reason it's a bad film

is because of how massively it betrays

both Batman and Superman,

making them both into absolute petulant idiots.

They're both violent and selfish and stupid.

And actually it completely ruins Lois Lane as well

and makes her into a terrible damsel in distress

who's a complete liability for the whole film.

It felt like a total betrayal

of these characters that we'd loved for such a long time

and a massive misunderstanding.

While DC's attempt to launch a rival

to Marvel's cinematic universe proved hugely divisive,

elsewhere superhero films

were going from strength to strength

and their stock within the wider film industry

continued to rise.

A thoroughly refreshed X-Men franchise

saw director Bryan Singer return to the helm

and combine his original heroes

with a new, younger cast

inDays of Future Past, which quickly became

the most commercially successful film in the series.

Elsewhere, Marvel Studios seemed like

it could do no wrong,

and alongside a second outing forThe Avengers,

fresh films emerged

that brought even less familiar characters

from the publisher's past to a global audience.

Marvel Studios, they're on fire.

WithGuardians of the Galaxy

Marvel showed, we can make a billion with people

that even comic book fans don't even know who they are.

Guardians of the Galaxy,

a title you can barely remember

which was, no offense guys,

but one of the worst comic books ever done

and they turned it into a fantastic movie.

But that's all they had.

The reason they did it was because they had nothing else.

They didn't have Daredevil, X-Men,

Spider-Man, Fantastic Four.

They'd licenced them all out.

What kind of deal were they making with Disney?

Disney in a weird way bought a pig in a poke.

But at the same time, they took that pig in a poke

and made it into gold.

Each one of them,

they're varying degrees of good and great

but they haven't had anything that's overtly terrible.

They haven't had anything that's a massive flop.

They haven't dropped the ball. Even Ant-Man, for God's sake.

If you talk about superheroes that should have never worked

should have never been able to work... Ant-Man.

What's the one movie that will never work?

Ant-Man. And it was great.

In some ways Ant-Man is the triumphant kiss

that Marvel can say, "We've done it."

That we can even get away with an Ant-Man movie.

For so long that would be a joke. It was a joke.

Will we ever see an Ant-Man movie?

Will we even see an Ant-Man comic book again?

The fact that Marvel was able to pull that off

in a successful film again with good casting...

That was Marvel's way of saying,

we can get away with anything.

And in the preceding years,

the studio continued to bring its Midas touch

to both sequels and new projects,

with Doctor Strange making his cinematic debut

and Spider-Man finally brought into the Marvel universe.

Elsewhere theX-Men franchise expanded,

with two groundbreaking movies aimed at an adult audience.

Deadpool blended extreme violence with acerbic comedy

and became a global sensation,

while Logan was Hugh Jackman's swansong asWolverine,

the somber closing chapter for the character

that had launched his career.

Having dominated popular culture for over a decade,

in the wake of these films,

comic book adaptations still offered new opportunities

for both the studios and cinemagoers.

And this was nowhere more apparent

than in two revolutionary films

released by DC and Marvel

within a 12-month period.

Wonder Woman finally gave this 75-year old character

a film of her own,

with Patty Jenkins the first ever woman

to helm an American studio superhero movie.

Marvel's Black Panther, on the other hand,

gave Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's landmark African superhero

a historic solo vehicle.

Studio execs in the past would have said,

"We can't do a female led movie because it won't sell.

We can't do a movie led by a person of color,

or people of color being the predominant cast

because it won't sell. Well, you're wrong.

People love Wonder Woman.

You don't have to be a girl to love Wonder Woman.

Everybody loves Wonder Woman.

I think it's taken so long to get Wonder Woman

to the big screen, because everyone was afraid

to do a female superhero movie

and you hold up films like Catwoman and Elektra

and say, "Oh, well, that's what...

'cause women can't be superheroes."

Well, no, they have to be in good movies.

I know when Gal Gadot was cast

people were a little concerned.

"Oh, well, she doesn't look this way."

Screw that. She was fantastic.

It was extremely important

and extremely significant as a movie.

It's ridiculous, quite honestly,

that we've had these universes since,

well, even if we just talk about MCU and DC it's 2008.

That's ten years that we haven't got a single female lead.

We have secondary characters around.

We've got Black Widow who is amazing

played by Scarlett Johansson, one of the most famous,

bankable actresses in the world

and she can't get her own movie.

This is absolute insanity.

Wonder Woman coming out,

being directed by a woman

having a very strong supportive cast of women

was a very significant thing.

DC beat Marvel to the punch

in terms of getting a female superhero their first film.

Then obviously Marvel have come out with Black Panther

and I think it is a hugely important cultural moment

having this film led by people of color set in Africa,

and the film does deal with issues of race head on.

It's not just that this is led

by a black guy. The cast is predominantly black.

And that actually is really groundbreaking.

It's not something we've seen in that universe.

It's not something we've seen in any superhero universe

or even in fact in any massive blockbuster universe.

So it is groundbreaking

and by giving it to Ryan Coogler,

who is a fantastic director,

who'd made Fruitvale Station and Creed,

both with Michael B. Jordan,

and it seems giving him a fairly free reign

to tell the story that he wanted to tell,

what actually you have

is a very important, very political,

really uplifting, very ground breaking movie

that does still feel like a Marvel movie.

To use the MCU to be able to talk about issues

that we probably wouldn't see in the multiplexes is amazing.

As the enormity

of Black Panther's cultural significance

and commercial success has proven,

superheroes remain not only popular

but hugely influential.

With global audiences still being introduced to characters

who have existed in the comics world for half a century,

the wealth of heroes and stories

yet to make the transition from the page to the screen

suggests that this popularity will endure.

And although the prominence of these icons

is at its highest point since their inception,

the comic book itself

has retained its specialist reputation.

Never returning to its sales peak of the 1990s,

as the print media becomes less relevant

in our modern age,

the artform that launched this global phenomenon

remains largely ignored.

As far as how comics were regarded

I don't think they were regarded any different.

You either like them or you don't like them.

A lot of people just don't like comics.

And there's thankfully people who do like them a whole lot.

For me, the key to it

is going to New York,

San Diego, wherever,

and having people stand in line

for three or four hours

and come up and say I read this book.

This book is cool. These characters are cool.

This book was important to me.

It helped me through a period of my life.

I thought this book was cool.

I've given it to my kids.

We think it's cool too.

Somehow or other,

somehow we did something right.