Tim Burton Robert Townsend Barry Levinson Dick Tracy Tommy Lee Jones Hollywood film show stars audience actor action Tim Burton Robert Townsend Barry Levinson Dick Tracy Tommy Lee Jones

Before ‘Black Panther,’ Black Superheroes Like ‘Blade’ Kept Comic Book Movies Alive

Reading now: 294
thewrap.com

While Hollywood chased pulp-era nostalgia, smaller superhero films centered on Black heroes to relative success. The industry spent the 1990s mistaking the success of Tim Burton’s “Batman,” which often played like a hardboiled post-World War II film noir, for an interest in 1930s and 1940s pulp heroes.

Whether this was a willful pursuit of nostalgic super heroics to avoid reckoning with present-tense issues or just a matter of effects technology not yet catching up to the needs of most modern-day superheroes, the post-“Batman” comic book superhero movie was dominated by sequels to Burton’s feature and period piece wannabes. “Dick Tracy,” “The Rocketeer,” “The Shadow” and “The Phantom” earned less combined, $200 million domestic, than “Batman” earned — $251 million – all by itself.

While major studios chased trench coats and homburgs, the superhero genres was kept commercially alive by films like “Spawn,” “Men in Black,” and “Blade,” not ironically, features fronted by Black actors.

Barry Levinson’s sci-fi/alien immigration comedy, starring Smith alongside Tommy Lee Jones, earned $589 million worldwide in the summer of 1997, more than any “Batman” movie, including 2.47x that summer’s “Batman & Robin,” up until “The Dark Knight.” “You see [Will Smith as] Agent J in ‘Men in Black,’” director JD Dillard (“Sleight,” “Devotion”) told TheWrap. “And to see someone who speaks like you and cracks jokes like you — even as a kid, even if you’re unaware of why it hits differently — it hits differently.” “Meteor Man” and “Steel” featured Black superheroes fighting poverty and gang violence As director and actor Robert Townsend noted in a conversation with TheWrap in relation to his 1993 film “Meteor Man” being pegged as the true first.

Read more on thewrap.com
The website starsalert.com is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.

Related News

DMCA