Predicting The Success Of The Next 10 Major Comic Book Movies

For a long time now, people have been wondering when the comic book movie bubble is finally going to burst, given the raft of adaptations that followed in the wake of the success enjoyed by Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man at the beginning of the 21st Century.

We are now eighteen years in, and the demand for superhero flicks has only increased. In fact, it would be fair to say that it has become the defining genre of the 2000s. The numbers don't lie: four of 2018's five highest-grossing movies feature spandex-clad heroes in further confirmation that the genre is here to stay for a while yet.

So many comic book movies come down the pipeline on an annual basis that over-saturation is a very real danger, but for every Jonah Hex or Green Lantern that threatens to undermine the entire genre, a Logan or Black Panther comes along to remind people just why these movies became so popular in the first place.

With more competition than ever before, the sad reality is that not all of the superhero movies in development are going to find success, while there is also no guarantee that they're going to be any good either. There are very few sure things in Hollywood, but a blockbuster based on a comic book is about as close as you can get.

Predicted Rotten Tomatoes Score: 33% Predicted Box Office: $200m

Alita: Battle Angel seems like a massive gamble from 20th Century Fox. Originally developed by James Cameron for close to a decade as a directorial project, Cameron has stepped back into the role of producer/co-writer and handed the reins over to Robert Rodriguez.

While it's easy to imagine James Cameron at the helm of a $200m sci-fi blockbuster, Rodriguez seems like a strange fit. After all, this is a guy who literally shoots a lot of his movies in his own backyard and usually has complete creative control over every aspect of his work, now trying to marshal a hugely-ambitious mega-budget production over twice as expensive as anything the filmmaker has ever made before.

So no pressure then.

The two trailers have shown glimpses of impressively large-scale world-building, but the story beats seem very familiar and the hybrid of live-action and CGI doesn't seem fully convincing. Recent history is littered with ambitious and expensive sci-fi projects that have struggled to connect with both critics and audiences alike including A Wrinkle in Time, John Carter, Ghost in the Shell, Valerian, Jupiter Ascending and even Blade Runner 2049.

All of the movies listed above wound up earning between $131m and $284m at the box office, and Alita will likely end up falling somewhere within that spectrum, even with the marketing heavily playing up Cameron's involvement.

It doesn't help either that the release date puts it among some serious competition with Mortal Engines, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Mary Poppins Returns, Aquaman and Bumblebee all competing for virtually the exact same audience in an incredibly stacked December marketplace.