Marvel Comics has won.
As a DC guy, it kills me to type that, but Marvel Comics has sewn up any sort of competition that DC and Marvel may have had for the past few decades.
Marvel is kicking DC's butt in the movie theater where Marvel has a comprehensive slate of movies that all tie together, drawing viewers deeper into a cohesive universe.
Marvel is kicking DC's butt in the toy store. The Girl and I went toy shopping this past weekend - she was taking part in a gift donation at her school and drew the task of buying Superman toys for a seven-year-old. At the local Toys-R-Us (one of the few that survived the crunch a couple of years back), we found an aisle full of Spider-man, Hulk, Iron Man, even Fantastic Four toys. Across the aisle, we found a pathetic selection of Batman toys and nary a single Superman to be found. When we asked a worker for Superman toys, she directed us to the Spider-man toys and seemed surprised that we hadn't found them. (Oh, and the pathetic Batman line had like a dozen differently costumed Batmen and only a single villain in the whole line. Stupid...)
Marvel's toy line had a bunch of kid-friendly toys: Superhero Squad and the very cool Mighty Muggs. DC, on the other hand, has headed straight for the dark side and licensed their characters for a Mortal Kombat game, out now on a couple of game systems.
Really, DC? You think that the way to guarantee a solid future for your company is to give up and surrender the minds of the children to your competitors? You're willing to gamble that a quick - and entirely out of character - cash grab is a better choice than sowing the seeds of future growth?
You think it's a good idea to allow your main stable of characters - heroes who have been preaching a doctrine of never killing always rehabilitating at every opportunity - to kill, maim, and murder at will?
This is dumb, guys, dumb.
I don't care whether the game's reviews are decent (though most seem to suggest that this game is the Brat of games in that it doesn't satisfy anybody) because this is a stupid idea.
If you're curious, though, you can check out some screen caps here and here.
3 comments:
Bu-bu-but what about the Dark Knight? Quality over quantity.
Although I do like the idea of the strand of movies coming together...
But still.
I always told you Marvel was cooler.
Oh, Dark Knight is the finest comic book movie yet made, true. But the Marvel universe of films is going to trump DC in huge fashion pretty quickly. The tie-ins with Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Avengers will be far more awesome in total than the trilogy of Batman flicks will be able to manage because there's nothing else as DC's entrants to the field. Superman Returns never happened.
Katydid - as a company, I agree with you...I still prefer reading DC comics, however.
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