9 Reasons 2016 Will Kill The Comic Book Movie Boom

3. The Supply Is Starting To Outweigh The Demand

Supply and demand: three simple words that are the very core of commerce. You'd think such a brief phrase would be easy for movie studios to remember. There are eight popular comic book adaptations scheduled to be released in 2016. There are twelve months in a year. Even though many of these qualify as "must-see" films for diehard comic fans, that's still a lot to stuff into the calendar. This goes beyond audiences being overwhelmed. This is a matter of studios playing a constant game of chess with their release dates. After all, DC doesn't want its properties to go head-to-head with Marvel, so they'll need to space them out accordingly. Likewise, Marvel can't have any overlap at the theaters, because that would end up damaging their own box office returns. They have to be released far enough apart so as to maximize the amount of hype without stepping on another property's toes, or causing fans to feel like they need to choose between two potentially great films. (Civil War and X-Men Apocalypse are both coming out in May, for example.) But because studios perceive the demand for these films to be a tad bigger than they actually are, they're not going to slow down on the time between release dates because...they can't. There's simply not enough months in the year.