9 Reasons 2016 Will Kill The Comic Book Movie Boom

4. They're Becoming Too Expensive To Produce

Comic book movies are becoming more and more costly to make. And there's going to come a point where even if every man, woman, and child with access to a movie theater buys a ticket to see it, those movies will only break even. And that's simply not a sustainable model for producing movies. To be fair, some very expensive comic book movies have already flopped pretty extravagantly (Green Lantern, Superman Returns) and studios haven't backed down. Because when you're a big enough company, you don't have to worry about a couple of downers at the box office. But we're not talking about a few flops here. We're talking about a steady decline in the return on investment. That will ensure one of two things: 1) studios cut the budgets down exorbitantly, causing filmmakers to get more creative with stories and effects (which would be a blessing in disguise) or 2) the ballooning budgets cause even more studio interference, causing every superhero movie to be watered-down retreads of what has been proven to work. Iron Man had a budget of $140 million and very little involvement from the studio. The Avengers: Age of Ultron had exactly double the budget and, with it, an abundance of meddling. And those budget numbers are only going to continue going upward. The question is whether or not box office trends can continue pulsing upward enough to sustain these movies' more rapidly inflating budgets.