Why did it take so long for Marvel movies to get good?

Basically in the late 80s you had Marvel movies that went straight to video or were on TV like The Punisher, Daredevil, Spider-man, etc. Then in the 90s there were ones that went straight to video like The Fantastic Four and Captain America.

I haven't seen all of them but here they were not very good. Then X-men comes out to theaters in the year 2000, and then most, if not all, of the Marvel movies are theater released from then on.

But what took it so long for it to get good since Marvel comics was selling well long before then, weren't they? Even DC had the theatrically released Superman and Batman movies under their belts before Marvel had a theatrical release on a movie.

Why is that?

For what it's worth, Blade is arguably the first proper theatrically-released Marvel superhero movie (it predates X-Men by two years) even if it is vastly different from most of the movies one associates with the brand.

As for why everything prior to Blade didn't work, that's hard to say. I'd have just put it down to the usual mix of poor decisions and bad luck that can often result in good/popular source material being adapted into bad/unpopular movies, plus the idea that Marvel Comics was considered lesser than D.C. (who not only invented the superhero with Superman but also had an equally long-running and iconic hero with Batman, both of which had greater cultural saturation than the likes of Spider-Man or the Hulk) arguably fed into Marvel getting lesser films (to say nothing about the various rights issues that resulted in stuff like the 1994 Fantastic Four). That's why it's interesting to note how Blade was technically the original Marvel hit - because Blade himself is such an obscure character that the film could more or less succeed as a stand-alone Wesley Snipes movie released during the peak of his fame and also end up inspiring the leather-clad millennial approach of X-Men in the process.

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Marvel was actually at bankruptcy in the early 90's as for Blade


http://screencrush.com/marvel-bankruptcy-billions/

Like Iroquois said, bad business decisions, which included less creative control, led to the earlier stinkers. Also, the TV movies were on a very limited budget and their producers, like many in that day, diluted or ignored the more fantastic elements because they didn't feel they would appeal to a wide audience.
I think the newer Marvel movies have benefitted from good timing. There are more creators in film who enjoyed the comics and more adult filmgoers who enjoy fantasy, particularly in video games.

It's down to the studio and the budget.
Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, live-action Marvel property was licensed and owned by small companies like Jadran Film and 21st Century Film Corporation.


Put it this way, Captain America (1990) was theatrically released, had a budget of $10m under the production company 21st Century FilmCorporation, which went bankrupt in 1997 and a cast that was C-List...


... but Superman: The Movie (1978), made 12 years earlier, had a budget of $55m and had the backing of Richard Donner, Columbia Pictures, and Warner Brothers and a solid cast.


Seems that the tides have turned with DC and Marvel though... and it's all down to Avi Arad who founded Marvel Studios in 1992 became an actual Producer for the first time with Blade in 1998... and then Avi Arad hired Kevin Feige in the year 2000, with his first movie being X-Men.
The rest is history.

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I personally hate marvel movies that’s just me I find them so boring I have fallen asleep in every single one

Oh okay, but why would a company like Marvel give themselves to be licensed by small companies like those for live action, instead of a much bigger movie company?

i think the market is over saturated with these superhero stuff, and for once, i don t have any incentive to go watch aquaman....i simply had enough of superhero mumbo jumbo

Presumably because the big companies didn't want them.

There was less mainstream interest in hard genre stuff decades ago. Things like sci-fi and fantasy have gradually become more popular.

Mainstream acceptance = more profit potential = more production value = better actors and writers = better movies.

That, and sometimes it just takes people awhile to figure stuff out. Different people are running it now than were running it then. Sometimes you hire people and they do a bad job, then you hire different people and they do a better job.

There'd only be any kind of mystery about this if the exact same people suddenly got great at it, which isn't what happened.

First three steps seem correct but reality malfunctions after that and as a result we often end up with really bad big budget mainstream movies.

Often, perhaps, but not always. Yoda's simply explaining the process that differentiates the early/bad Marvel movies from the later/good ones.

Yeah, "better" is relative. A lot of big budget genre affairs are pretty blah, but compare them to really low budget schlock decades ago. The ones that didn't become cult classics. They're even worse.

Also, I think the way in which big budget films are bad is more that they're bland and predictable, as opposed to just totally nonsensical or stupid (I'm sure people will chime in with exceptions, and preemptively: fair enough). But a lot of them are adhering to tried-and-true dramatic formulas and shadows of the monomyth and all that, even if we're all so familiar with them that it's actually really hard to make a compelling film with that alone, now.

Yeah a lot of them have been bad lately, but I think that in the 2000s, a lot of the superhero movies were really good in comparison, and certaintly better than the straight to video Marvel ones of the 90s and late 80s.

As for the movie companies that licensed the movies not having enough money to put into them, wasn't Marvel comics a rich company that could afford to throw more money into the pile if needed to get the movies better writers, and get them released in theaters?

I don't think comics were especially lucrative by that point, but even if this were, the answer is above, in the part about increased audience interest. Even if they had the money, it probably wasn't a smart investment (or, at least, it was riskier then than it was later). Comics had largely been shunted off to the side, culturally, as a niche interest, and genre films were the same way. It may be hard to imagine now, but historically it's pretty crazy that they've become so ascendant.

I think part of the reason it was only smaller studios that had the rights... is that Marvel weren't that well known.


The public knew about Hulk and Spider-Man... and that was it I think.


Hulk, who was known as David Banner as they couldn't use the proper name due to licensing... and they knew about Spider-Man, who was a skinny guy wearing swimming goggles and a pair of baggy pyjamas with marker-pen lines drawn on them, who would do amateur Karate kicks at the bad guys...


... and, the public knew about... erm... ??... ???...
I'm stuck now.


So yeah... Hulk and Spidey.
I mean, one extreme angle I could take here, is that a majority of the population had absolutely no idea that there was something called Guardians Of The Galaxy until the movie appeared in 2014...


And this:

Was the best live-action version they could muster for Iron Man back in 1978... the same year that Superman: The Movie was breaking moulds and records.

Before X-Men (Hugh Jackman/Bryan Singer), and Iron-Man (Robert Downey Jr/Jon Favreau) the most successful Marvel character was the 70s tv series The Incredible Hulk, which had NOTHING to do with the comic book. The performances of Jackman & RDJ set the standard on how comic book characters could be portrayed successfully and the storytelling of Singer & Favreau showed how it could be sold. It's amazing how in life if someone breaks a record then it becomes a more commonplace possibility .

Okay thanks. But how come other comic book movies were able to become successful though that were not Marvel comics?

Movies like Dick Tracy (1990), The Crow (1994), The Phantom (1996), The Shadow (1994), were all based off comic books and they were able to get big budget feature films, so why wasn't Marvel able to, when compared to those movies?