How's it hangin' team? So, I just had a thought when I was checking out the upcoming Marvel/DC slates (check out this cool infographic from IGN.com.) Looking at the upcoming plan, it looks like Marvel's 'Avenger's Universe' will probably be wrapped up by about 2020 (Thor, Cap, and Avengers trilogies will be done by then.) Amazing Spider-man will probably also be done by then, and possibly Guardians of the Galaxy and Fantastic Four as well. As it currently looks, the seemingly never-ending X-men universe has the biggest potential to continue past the 2020 mark.
As for DC, they certainly have less films planned for the next 6 years, but we expect that we will see the first Justice League, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Shazam! as well as the second Man of Steel. If DC plans on producing trilogies for all of its major heros as well as the JLA, they could have a structured film-verse for at least the next 10-15 years.
So what happens after that? Assuming that the popularity of Superhero films doesn't die down over the next 20 years (I hope it doesn't), how will the two major companies move into the next phase of their cinematic sectors? The easy rout obviously would be to reboot the characters and teams again, but that would be a move that audiences probably wouldn't want for quite a while. So ignoring that obvious and lame answer to 'what's next', I see two more options that the studios could exercise. The first would be to continue the current franchises past a trilogy, at a slowing rate. We love getting new hero movies every year, but at the rate they're pumping them out, a continued franchise would start to decrease in quality very quickly. Perhaps if a new film from one franchise was put out every 4 years instead of every 2 the quality would last longer. The other option would be to just explore more obscure and less known titles. This would be a huge risk for the studios, but with a potentially large upside. Marvel and DC could start putting out films that the average person wouldn't recognize based on title (like Guardians of the Galaxy.) This would give the big name heros a rest, and open up audiences to a whole new group of comic book characters. Titles such as Suicide Squad and Red Hood and the Outlaws for DC or Nova and Iron Fist for Marvel. Comic book fans like us would obviously be thrilled and would flock to theaters, and as long as average audiences would also attend (lets face it, they would) then the films could be huge hits. I don't know what the future will hold for us in comic book films, but it sure will be interesting to see what happens.
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