A Dying Medium

Since their initial popularity in the late 1990's, comic book franchise films have been among the most profitable properties to date.  They were made to adapt beloved characters from pulp pages to the silver screen, and have done a faithful job for the majority of the time.  Films like Blade and X-Men helped to kick-start the popularity of these movies, and films like Avengers created a new form of cinematic storytelling in the form of a "Cinematic Universe," which many other production companies have been trying to emulate and match the success of Marvel with their own properties.

These movies have not been doing their jobs.  While one goal is to tell audiences a good story, the other is to sell the audiences on the characters portrayed on screen, in hopes to get them to buy comic books.  Before the popularity of these films, comic book sales in the early 1990's were through the roof, selling over a hundred thousand copies.  Now the most popular characters (Batman, Spider-Man, etc.) are lucky to break 15,000.

One strategy implemented by these publishers is to cancel a comic book series if there are plans to make a film around it, then restart the series from issue #1 once the film is out.  This does cause for some successful sales, but sales numbers plummet as early as the second issue.  While Marvel's film properties are hugely successful, they are the worst offender of this strategy when it comes to their comic books.  There are some cases where a series is restarted when a trailer is released, then cancelled and restarted again by the time the actual film/TV show premieres.  It's a sickening practice to boost profit by a small, temporary margin.

The Star Wars films have always been viewed as feature-length toy commercials, and creator George Lucas has openly agreed with these statements.  The comic books films, however, are not acting as advertisements for the comics they want to sell.  Instead it's the opposite, with the comic books acting as advertisements for the films.  Like the Western, the Superhero genre will eventually fizzle out, and what will be left is an industry desperately trying to stay afloat.