3. The Gothic Age - 1987-1999
Dimension FilmsDuring the 1980s the writing on mainstream comics underwent a shift from bright and family friendly to gloomy and grown up thanks to the likes of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. It was inevitable that sooner or later film would take on board this tonal change and, sure enough, if the 1970s and early 80s were coloured in red, white and blue, the comic book film of the 90s would prefer black (and sometimes very, very dark grey). It was not a case of making movies that imagined comic book heroics in a grittily realistic surrounding (that would have to wait another couple of decades). No, these were films of heightened Gothic sensibilities and grandiose expressionistic designs. The key figure in this movement was Tim Burton. Handing the Beetlejuice director the keys to the Batmobile was a bold move on the part of Warner Brothers, but Burton's two Batman films were major successes and his cartoonish Gothic mise-en-scene established the popular style to imitate. Barry Sonnenfeld's take on Charles Addams' macabre New Yorker comic strips gave us the Burton-lite The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), which would, like Batman, spawn a popular animated TV series. The post-Burton art deco noir toned Batman: The Animated Series would inspire a generation of similar animated takes on comic icons and a whole DC Animated Universe, as well as three movies of its own that, like its live action equivalents, started strong and gradually declined in quality. Just as Batman's rogues' gallery made for as viable a source for adaptation in the 90s as it had in the 40s, Dick Tracy also returned in Warren Beatty's high budget adaptation, praised for its comic strip art direction more than its plotting. Tracy was joined amongst 30s comic stars on screen by The Spirit (in a 1987 TV movie starring Flash Gordon's Sam Jones) and The Phantom in 1996. Many of the Gothic Age characters on screen, however, had their origins in darker, more recent comics of the 70s and 80s. Skull shirted vigilante The Punisher appeared on the page in 1974 and onscreen in the form of Dolph Lundgren in 1989. Resurrected rock goth The Crow made the transition even quicker, with his first comic published in 1989 and the film adaptation in 1994. The Crow would eventually manage three sequels and a TV series despite the tragic death of star Brandon Lee mid-shoot. Badass black vampire killer Blade had been a supporting character in the Marvel universe since 1973, but only got his own title in 1994. The $40 million budget for the character's big screen adaptation may seem like small fry compared to today, but it represented a significant investment in a comic property at the time and the gloomy actioner became the first Marvel adaptation to secure any meaningful profit. The $131 million it earned set Marvel up for the success its properties would enjoy in the new century. Away from the US the first films based on Japanese manga to pick up a significant international audience, 1988's Akira and 1995's Ghost in the Shell, used the same nocturnal rain sodden urban noir landscapes to tell technologically dystopian stories of the near future. Although not based itself on an individual comic, The Matrix represented a hugely successful marriage of these Eastern and Western noir comic styles. Its zeitgeist-y success on release in 1999 allowed for the breakthrough of the comic book actioner as a major genre in itself in the years that followed.
Key Film: Batman (1989)
Warner Bros.More influenced by Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau than Bob Kane or Adam West, Tim Burton's Batman created a Gotham City full of long dark shadows and angular architecture where every character from the protagonist down is a freak in a mask and set the tone for the whole era.