Hype is a curious thing. On one hand, how you can fully enjoy the experience of something unless you've been waiting for it? On the other, it's the single biggest reason that a person might ruin something for themselves. In movie terms, hype can be a motion picture's best friend or its worst enemy. Hype brings audiences out in their droves, after all, but it also primes them for a backlash when things don't go their way. The larger the hype, the worse the backlash. No genre of film knows this better than that of the comic book movie, because who, after all, are more plainly passionate about their subject than comic book fans? For well over a decade now, comic book movies have been shipped into theatres with varying levels of hype attached. From time to time, a movie will manage to live up to its expectations, revealing a product that is both solid and satisfying to fans. But that's not always the case. Unfortunately for studios, directors and writers all over the globe, dozens of comic book movies are unveiled to audiences of excited movie-goers, year after year, only to be outright rejected on the basis that they didn't live up to the puffery generated in the months leading up to their release day. "This isn't what I imagined!" somebody might shout. "I expected something far better than this!" cries another, perhaps on the verge of tears. Who's to blame, then? Well, it varies: sometimes a hyped up movie genuinely fails to deliver what it seemed to promise. In other cases, high expectations ruin everything...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
