2024 was a garbage year for comic book films. Simply abysmal. Even as a huge fan of the comic book movies, a champion of them such as I, couldn’t defend this year. There were seven comic book films released this year. Only six made it to American theaters, of those six, only one was a hit with audiences and reviewers. The rest joined the list of some of the worst movies of all time.
People have been predicting the death of the comic book film genre for years. This year was bad enough to actually kill it. And it would be a death by a self-inflicted wound, an inadvertent suicide.
Let me go in chronological order to try and explain.
The year started when Sony Pictures gave us the shittiest Valentine’s Day gift ever in the form of Madame Web. 2024 was a big year for Sony, where they released three films tying into their Spider-Man Universe. A year that, by the end of it, ended so badly that people were talking about Sony selling the Spider-Man rights back to Disney/Marvel.
How could the Spider-Man Universe go so wrong? A lot of the answers are found in this film. There has been a lot written about this movie. Heck, even I wrote about it and its place in Sony’s problematic Spider-Man franchise. The only good thing about the film is that a lot of people now know what ADR is.
In case you still don’t know, ADR stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement. Madame Web uses it a lot. A lot. Normally, this isn’t an issue. A lot of films use ADR. But most of the other films don’t do as much or as sloppily as Madame Web did. Tahar Rahim, who plays the film’s villain, Ezekiel Sims, had most, if not all, of his dialogue replaced by this process. And it wasn’t done pretty. Not only did Rahim’s lips not match his dialogue at time, but also there were times that his lips did not move at all.
It was sloppy and unprofessional. It was one of the main ways how Sony showed their disdain for their target audiences, be they comic book fans, comic book movie fans or just plain old movie fans. Madame Web was a film that deserved its 11% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. But since there are other Sony films on this list, I’ll continue talking about Sony’s downfall when we get to them.
Now we come to Hellboy, the comic character whose cinematic life would not die. Well, not until now that is. Probably.
First of all, let me clear the air. I am a Hellboy fan. I own most of his adventures in either single issues or trade paperbacks. So, I like seeing the big red guy up on the big screen. Unfortunately, I am in a very small minority.
Back in 2019, when the first Hellboy reboot failed to make its budget back and earned only a 17% fresh at the box office, I declared the franchise dead. Mike Mignola thought differently. He decided that if a $50 million movie could make $44 million, if he kept that budget to $20 million, and still got that $44 million in grosses, he’d have a franchise making hit on his hands.
Sound thinking, if Hellboy: The Crooked Man was released in the theaters in the U.S. so it could make some of that budget back. It wasn’t released in the theaters in the United States and barely received a limited release in internationally back in June (It was released on streaming in the U.S. in October). It’s total gross from theaters was a mind-numbingly low $2 million. There are flops, there are disastrous flops, and there’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man.
I can’t see a way for this franchise to continue, at least not without a big break. Hellboy might be popular in the comics, but it appears that movie goers want to have nothing to do with him.
The one bright spot in the year is, of course, Deadpool and Wolverine. If this film flopped, the comic book film would be in major trouble.
But the film garnered a 78% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes and $1.3 billion at the box office, proving that you can make a good movie that gives audiences what they want and make a boatload of money. Seems so simple, but none of the other films released this year appear to have learned that lesson.
Naysayers might point out that any pairing of Wolverine and Deadpool would make bank, especially one with the built-in curiosity of being the first Deadpool released under the Disney/Marvel Studios banner. But the grosses prove that the genre might not be dead yet.
The Crow remake spent years in development hell before finally getting made. It should have stayed there.
There are certain people who thought the original The Crow shouldn’t have been remade because of the emotions of Brandon Lee’s death tied up into it. I kinda felt that way too, but also adding that the 1994 was an almost perfect interpretation of the comic book. Eric and Shelley had a love that could not be denied. The film captured the sorrow and melancholy of the book, with the anger and violence of the revenge that the shattered love affair brought about.
The remake chucks that powerful romance, replaces it with a couple week tryst between two junkies, a love that Eric questions mid film. But in the place of the melancholic romance, they amp up the blood and gore to obscene levels. Yay!
This is a remake done by people who just didn’t understand the source material or thought they could improve on it. They were wrong, The 22% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes bears that out.
I did not like the Joker. It was a Martin Scorsese rip off with plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through.
But a lot of people loved it., to the tune of over a billion dollars worldwide. So, much to my chagrin, I knew there would be a sequel.
And lucky for me, Joker: Folie à Deux caused the rest of the world to come around to my way of thinking. In a fit of hubris, Todd Phillips created a turgid jukebox musical where he chastised everyone who got the message of the first movie wrong and did it for almost three times the original cost. The film scored a 31% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and barely made its budget back. Schadenfreude never felt so good,
There was also another Venom film the year, and it might be the last. Or, at the very least, the last one starring Tom Hardy.
Venom: The Last Dance held true to the franchises trend of not being terribly good films (it got a 41% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it the Citizen Kane of the Sony Spider-Man films released this year) but being nonetheless entertaining. It was a chaotic mess, but I was still pulling for Eddie and Venom by the end,
Tom Hardy only signed on for only three Venom films, so the film had an air of finality about it. But the film also made $475 million worldwide, which doesn’t seem to be a lot but was triple the films approximately $120 million budget. That is the yardstick for making a profit. The Venom franchise has been the high point of the Sony Spider-Man Universe at the box office. I can’t see Sony being willing to move on without it.
That is if Sony continues with its Spider-Man Universe at all. The long-delayed Kraven the Hunter ended the year for Sony with a whimper, opening to only 11 million at the box office and getting a 16% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. It was the latest in line of failures for Sony, and the fact that it came in the same year as the failure known as Madame Web caused “insiders” to claim that Sony was selling the Spider-Man IP back to Marvel.
That was an apple-pie-in-the-sky rumor. Between the money it makes from its partnerships with Marvel over the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, the animated Spiderverse films, and the Venom franchise, Sony has made billions off of the Spider-Man license. And that’s even after their flops. They aren’t giving it up.
But the Spider-Man Universe might be going away for a while. And to that I say, good. Sony didn’t even seem to have a solid plan for these films at all. I mean, what happened to the team Vulture and Morbius was putting together in Morbius? Is Madame Web in the same universe as Venom? As Kraven? Do any of them tie in to any Spider-Man Universe? If so, which one?
Sony quickly found out that just because over 900 characters came with the Spider-Man license, very few of them could support a feature film on their own. A third of them are powerless supporting characters. Half of them are villains, most of who work best when they are working off of Spider-Man.
Sony had to change a lot about these characters just to have them support a feature film, so much that at times they barely resembled the source material. And Sony didn’t care how much they had to change to make them a film because they thought they could make any shitty movie with any tenuous connection to Spider-Man and it would be a hit. They were lazy, sloppy and complacent. And because of that, their Spider-Man Universe went down in flames and almost took the whole superhero film genre with it.
Being that 2024 ended with such a fizzle, 2025 has a lot of heavy lifting in order to keep the comic book film genre going. There are only going to be four films on the docket for next year, but two are going to be big ones that might be enough to turn the make or break year to the make side.
The year will get off to a shaky start with Captain America: Brave New World. The film notoriously had to undergo major reshoots to fix its story problems and when that gets out, it is hard to shake the stigma that the film will be awful. Thunderbolts would appear to fare better based on its fun and funny trailer, but there are still a lot of questions about that film.
Then come the big two. Superman will hit theaters on July 11th and based on its just released teaser trailer, it looks terrific. It will be the cornerstone of the new line of DCU films, so there is a lot of pressure for it to succeed. Then, a few weeks later, Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters. I am less certain about this one due to it taking place in and alternate universe during a high-tech version of the 1960s. It seems like a lot of bells and whistles for a reboot film, and the premise alone means that it won’t be a part of the mainstream MCU until at least Avengers: Secret Wars. ut if it fails, it might be the straw that breaks the back of the entire MCU.
