There's this guy I know with retractable adamantium claws. He's the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn't very nice. His name is James Logan Howlett, but you may know him as Wolverine, the regenerating mutant.
He had a big movie this summer, one of the first blockbusters of the year. Although it may not have any merit as art, it met every criteria of awesome: a little bit of comic relief, lots of snarling, a plot that makes no sense at all, violence,
explosions and violent explosions.
Summer blockbusters really are more of a genre than a time frame. For me, it started with a midnight showing of Watchmen at the Athena Grand. Back in March, I walked three miles from Hoover Hall to see the superhero epic. The theater was packed, with at least one attendant even dressing as the masked vigilante Rorschach. He's not exactly a character to be admired, let alone imitated. It was quite the display of sociopathic fandom.
But the summer blockbuster is a time-honored tradition, and recently it's been feeding pretty heavily from previous source material. Remakes, reboots and adaptations are fundamental to cinema, but if all our movies are based on something else, why watch movies? Why not read the books or check out the original series?
Well, usually the film deviates from the original work. X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes Wade Deadpool Wilson, a
fan-favorite comic relief character, into some sort of overpowered Omega-level mutant. Ohio University joined the act as well, producing the feature-length film Trailerpark from a series of novels. And although Watchmen was perhaps one of the most faithful adaptations of any work into film, the producers changed enough so the parting message of the film is nearly
opposite that of the graphic novel.
It seems a little pointless to base a work on anything if it changes as much as these movies were from their origins. Anyone devoted to the Transformers
canon will tell you Revenge of the Fallen is not a film - it's a two-hour-long middle finger.
The creators of the awful Transformers films could easily have made some sort of original series, which really would be perfect: Michael Bay could triple his nonsense and create an entirely new
franchise in the process. Sure, the
Transformers name conjures many a cool image, but creative talent shouldn't be enough to part the viewer from $10.
Not every film needs a licensed
property to do well. Two of the year's biggest movies, Inglourious Basterds and The Hangover succeeded just fine as original material. But even now, a Hangover
sequel is planned for 2011, essentially fulfilling the life cycle of the entertainment industry. Assuming that does well, we could easily have a Hangover
franchise to deal with.
The American entertainment industry is astounding. A movie based on toys sells more toys, and toys sell movie tickets. A movie based on comics then spawns comics based on the movie. Cross promotion puts more money in studio's
coffers, not to mention providing the
audience with more content. The relationship between creators and consumers is often strained, but too often we forget that it's a symbiotic relationship.
When something is successful, a
movie gets made. And if enough money gets thrown at that movie, it just might be a summer blockbuster. Welcome to Earth.
Greg Mercer is a junior studying video production and columnist for The Post. Send him your film adaptations at gm295306@ohiou.edu
4 Opinion
Greg Mercer
