Fresh Loaf

ELECTRIC SLIDE: Unlike animated features, live-action adaptations require intricate and expensive special effects, such as Jon Osterman's (Billy Crudup) transformation into Dr. Manhattan for 'Watchmen.' (Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

After more than 20 years, DC Comics’ Watchmen will make the quantum leap from comic-book page to live-action film with its release this Friday. If hype and anticipation translate to even a fraction of box office success, Watchmen will affirm the popularity of superheroes — and even R-rated antiheroes — as Hollywood’s saviors. The blockbuster could join the ranks of such record breakers as the Spider-Man trilogy and the Oscar-winning The Dark Knight.

Superhero movies make the transition from ink and paper to celluloid the hard way, however. Saving the world and defeating flamboyant evildoers is the least of it. Simply making an exciting, convincing superhero movie that doesn’t insult an audience’s intelligence practically demands a miracle. Cinematic, super-powered derring-do requires massively expensive special effects, along with the challenge of casting flesh-and-blood actors to play literally two-dimensional, archetypal roles with impossible physiques and ridiculous costumes.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires.

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Released today on DVD, The Incredible Hulk was meant to be a dramatic do-over of the 2003 Hulk feature film. Marvel hoped the first Hulk would match the record-breaking success of its previous year’s Spider-man, but Ang Lee’s cerebral, angsty take on the raging green giant was an underperformer. Despite its $137 million budget, Hulk earned $132 million theatrically in the United States (and $245 million worldwide).

As a “reboot” sequel, Incredible brought in French action director Louis Leterrier, pumped up the premise as a combination of monster movie and manhunt flick and enlisted a new cast, with Edward Norton replacing Eric Bana as the Hulk’s anguished alter ego, Bruce Banner. Incredibly, the financial results were practically identical: Leterrier’s film had a $150 million budget and made $134 million in the U.S. ($261 worldwide) — and that’s not factoring inflation into the equation. Here are five theories as to why Incredible failed to pump up the box office.

1. Memories of the first film scared people off. Ang Lee’s Hulk contains some thrilling, fascinating set pieces. The scenes of the Hulk bounding across the Southwestern desert, battling tanks and helicopters, feature a weird lyricism matched by few movies of any kind, let alone comic book films. Unfortunately the film, which lasts well over two hours, is surrounded by sluggishly-paced scenes, weird Oedipal plotting that seldom makes dramatic sense and superfluous, “24”-style split screens and effects that replicate comic book panels for no good reason. Making a follow-up to a movie nobody liked was bound to be a risk, although Incredible opts to ignore Lee’s continuity and pay affectionate homage to the old “Incredible Hulk” TV series.

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Batman soared more like Superman over the weekend when The Dark Knight earned an estimated $155.4 million. The sequel to Batman Begins broke most of the records that can be broken, including biggest opening weekend and, according to The Vulture:

the records for biggest single-day gross ($67 million on Saturday), largest number of opening theaters (4,366 nationally), biggest midnight gross ($18.5 million on Thursday night), best-ever July opening (beating Pirates of the Caribbean 2’s measly $136 million in 2006).

Final numbers will be in later today, so it’s possible Spider-man 3’s previous record could stand. It’s likely that Spider-man 3 sold more total tickets, with the higher ticket prices giving The Dark Knight the edge.

Apparently nobody saw it coming, either. The Dark Knight was generally expected to break $100 million (like Iron Man or better), but not to have one of the most successful weekends in film history. Most hugely successful movies tend to be brighter, flashier and more fun, and The Dark Knight was accurately perceived as being dark to point of despair, as the above image from someecards suggests.

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Since The Dark Knight is finally in theaters (and apparently already broke records for midnight shows last night), it’s high time to get all obsessed and bent out of shape over the next geeky superhero adaptation: Watchmen. The adaptation of the landmark graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen will open on March 6 of 2009, but an elaborate teaser trailer is attached to The Dark Knight, and in a way, it’s even cooler than it looks:

Watchmen was a 12-issue miniseries published in the mid-1980s, and is generally considered to be one of the most complex and innovative comic book stories every published — it’s called the medium’s equivalent to Citizen Kane. Watchmen offers a revisionist portrait of superheroes set in a dysutopian, alternate-history version of America in which, among other things, the United States won the Vietnam war and made the Asian nation the 51st state of the union. (You can see a glimpse of Dr. Manhattan, the book’s equivalent of Superman, killing a Viet Cong.) I wrote my 1989 master’s thesis on Watchmen and can attest that nearly all of the images in the trailer are completely faithful with the graphic novel, a rarity in Hollywood.

Writer Alan Moore, who currently publishes comics through Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions, has been badly served by misbegotten Hollywood adaptations like LXG (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). And even though the trailer looks pitch-perfect, can Zack Snyder, director of the similarly faithful but hardly subtle graphic novel adaptation 300, possibly shoehorn enough of the book’s dense content into a satisfying two hour movie? Keeping watching.

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Some early notices for the epic-length Batman drama The Dark Knight suggest that the late Heath Ledger gives the “definitive” performance as The Joker, the Caped Crusader’s sociopathic arch-nemesis. It’s true that Ledger does tremendous, terrifying work in the film — if he’d lived, he could have launched a second career playing psychos. I’m not sure, however, that anyone can give the definitive performance of such a pop culture mainstay. In high-brow terms, it’s like expecting a definitive Macbeth or Blanche DuBois. Like any enduring fictional character, the Joker has a long history that reflects changes in his target audience and creative staff — we get different Jokers for different times. Following are five of the traits that make The Clown Prince of Crime possibly the most memorable and timeless villain of them all.

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