Not Comics: Green Lantern Movie Makes Disappointing $53M



Apparently, that's not very good. I don't know anything about the film business even though I know modern pop-culture cognizant people are supposed to pretend they do. I'm not even sure how this has an effect on the comics business in the long term, even though logic dictates that having a first movie launched under the umbrella of a general synergistic strategy between DC and the film and licensing parts of the Warners empire, and having that movie not perform to even diminished expectations, that's probably more bad news than good.

I do know that comics people feel this kind of thing deeply, so you're likely in the next 24-36 hours to have some folks high-fiving about this and other folks ripping into them for being overly negative, and how did your movie do, and that those rips will extend in some cases to anyone that talks about the news at all. I'm sympathetic to all sides. When you're a comics fan you're set up to cheer for factions. At the same time I don't know how this film making $130 million out of the opening gate wouldn't have been a potential positive for the entire industry, given DC's stated aims and the way companies like DC continue to shape comics publishing in ways that depend on their success for the general success of the industry. (I know people will disagree with me on that last point, if not all the broad ideas generated here.)

Do you know what struck me as odd? Was there a Green Lantern book that was the spotlight book for any and all attention the character might have received in the run-up to the movie? I can't detect one by looking at various charts, and it seems to me that finding such a book would have been a priority for DC given how much money they made on Watchmen and even their core Batman trades and more direct, same-theme tie-ins like that Joker thing Lee Bermejo did in 2008. Am I wrong about that? Was there a Green Lantern book that benefited from the publicity?

Update To Paragraph Three: Johanna Draper Carlson -- who tends to know these things -- suggests this book was the focus book, which makes sense to me. I was a bit confused by its placement on the May DM chart and the Amazon sales rankings for "Green Lantern," which potentially -- potentially -- suggests that maybe it didn't do great, but that's way different than implying there wasn't a book DC focused on.
 
posted 12:23 am PST | Permalink
 

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