If The Avengers was a country, it would have the 167th largest GDP in the world, coming in just ahead of Belize.
No, seriously. The 2012 Avengers movie managed to bring in $1.5 billion worldwide at the box office, and that’s just at the theater. That’s not including the endless amounts of DVDs, Blu-rays, iTunes downloads, toys, clothing, and Halloween costumes. While numbers for all of that merchandise are not readily available, it’s a safe bet that there’s a whole lot of money there as well.
And don’t get me started on records. Avengers now holds the record for: opening weekend for any film (both raw and adjusted), theater average, second weekend for any film, monthly share of domestic earnings, highest cumulative gross, the records for days to reach $100 million to $550 million, at $50 million increments, most money earned by a superhero movie, and is currently the third highest grossing movie of all time.
Basically, it earned a whole lot of money really, really fast. All on top of the fact that it was actually a pretty solid movie, holding a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Avengers is not on it’s own. Of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time, three of them (The Dark Knight Rises and Iron Man 3 along with the aforementioned Avengers) are comic book movies. Comic book movies are undoubtedly a massive business today. The $220 million budget of a comic movie like Avengers is no longer unheard of. It’s no longer weird to hear that Christian Bale was offered $50 million to reprise his role as Batman for an upcoming Batman movie.
But one question no one really asks when you hear all of this is: what about the actual comic books themselves? How much money do they make? Surely some of the success of the recent movies must have translated over to higher comic book sales. Right?
The answer is a confident and resounding: sort of.
The gross of the top two comic book movies that came out in 2012 (Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises): $2.6 billion. The total gross of ALL comic books that same year: $475 million, an increase of about 15% from 2011. A big number and a decent increase on its own, but just a fraction of the total of only two comic book movies. If we look at the sales of the top two comic books that number shrinks to $2.5 million. And even that number is partially the result of the extremely popular The Walking Dead series of graphic novels. If we adjust our sales to only include superhero comics: the number is $2.02 million.
So why?
Why hasn’t the comic book industry seen the same explosion that the comic movie industry has? Does the appeal of the movies just not transfer over? Is it the nerdy stigma that still manages to cling onto reading comic books? Do kids just hate reading?
“Comic book movies have exploded for one really good reason: when you look at the Marvel movies, Marvel Entertainment has realized that you cannot go on the cheap to make these movies,” owner of Langes’ Sports, a local comic book and sports store, Todd Lange said. “So now they go out and they hire the best directors, they hire the best actors. They know that if they spend $200 million on something like Avengers, maybe we can make $1 billion. They’re taking the approach that just because it’s a comic movie or character, doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously.
Senior, avid comic fan, and son of Todd Lange, Harrison Lange agrees.
“I think the movies has really raised interest in more and more people,” Harrison Lange said. “Comic books are kind of an older thing and movies these days are really really big. Especially with how special effects are and big actors and visually it’s more cool.”
Running down a list of actors for a comic book movie these days is like reading a list of all-star actors. Big names like Robert Downey Jr. and Anne Hathaway appear regularly, and sign extremely lucrative contracts. Meanwhile the only recognition comic books get is from the superheroes themselves. Quick, name someone who works at Marvel other than Stan Lee. If you’re like me, you couldn’t answer that.
But that can’t be it. After all, plenty of movies do really really well without any big name actors. Is it the fact that comic books tend to be harder to get than the movies? After all, you can download a movie on iTunes in your bedroom, but you can’t even find a true comic book in the Grand Haven High School Library. Todd Lange doesn’t think so.
“I don’t think if more kids knew how to get a comic book they’d read them, but when Marvel and DC get to the point where everything is on a Kindle where you can download it, that will be the big transformation,” Todd Lange, said. “It’s not like how it is to get an e-book, but it’s going to get easier. The internet has made it possible that if you want something you can get it.”
“Our business has changed so much that 85 percent of our business is done on the Internet between eBay and Amazon. It’s gotten to the point where if someone wants a book but they can’t find it locally they can go online to Amazon or eBay to get it and have it delivered to their house. I think when you can just download a comic online and read it on your Kindle like you can a newspaper, that will change things at that point. But you’re probably still three or four years away before that happens.”
As of Dec. 8 the two big name publishers of comic books, DC Comics and Marvel, both have things for sale on the Kindle Store. But what they sell tends to be more cumulative in nature. They’re books that contain a whole storyline or a few comics, not the individual comics themselves. For someone who wants to read comics exclusively online that means a longer waiting period for that cumulative edition to come out. Though to be fair, the comic ebooks are praised for being exactly like the physical comic books, with no concessions to art being made. They’re as pretty as the real thing, just on a tablet instead of gloss paper.
So if availability is part of the problem, what’s the other part? Is it the nerdy stigma associated with comic books?
“There’s some people that just assume everyone who reads comic books these days are nerds,” Harrison Lange said. “Which is kind of an old stigma, and when you think of Comic Con you think of your stereotypical nerd, which is kind of true. But most of the time people aren’t like that.”
But then why doesn’t the nerdy stigma carry over onto the movies? The answer seems to lie with the aforementioned big name actors and the quality of the movies themselves. Comic book movies these days tend to be simple enough to still be comprehensible to the newbies, but not so shallow that hardcore comic book veterans walk out disappointed.
“[Marvel] knows that if they spend $200 million on something like Avengers, maybe we can make $1 billion, and they can because they are not dumbing down the movies like they used to do when comic book movies were first coming out 15 years ago,” Todd Lange said. “They’re taking the approach that just because it’s a comic movie or character, doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously. And you end up with stuff like Avengers. Then you can add stuff at the end like the appearance of Thanos, which for me will make me go ‘Oh my god that’s unbelievable’ in a good way. But they do it in such a way that if you don’t know what it is you’ll think ‘Who is this Thanos guy?’ It’s that not knowing that draws you even more in.”
Whatever the final mix of reasons that everyone isn’t reading comic books is, one thing is for sure: comic book store owners aren’t complaining about the popularity of the movies.
“ I think the movies is a great generation gap thing that brings the younger people in,” Todd Lange said. “If it wasn’t for movies, I don’t think the people under the age of 32 would have any interest in comic books whatsoever, because if you want a comic book these days you either have to order it online or you have to go find a shop like mine to go get it. You can’t walk into a D & W or a drug store and buy one anymore, you’d have to go to a specific spot to find it. Movies overall have been a great benefit to my industry, but it’s not just from the comic aspect, it’s from many other aspects.”
Websites For Sourcing and Dirty Little Fact Checkers
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp
http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html