The Four Color Media Monitor

Film director M. Night Shayamalan, according to Variety, says the studio producing 2000's Unbreakable didn't want to market it as a comics movie for reasons so silly, they've long become classic:

M. Night Shyamalan participated in a career retrospective interview with GQ magazine to mark the release of his latest directorial effort, “Trap,” and remembered studio executives not wanting to market 2000’s “Unbreakable” as a comic book movie. How the times have changed. Shyamalan and star Bruce Willis were coming off the enormous success of “The Sixth Sense,” which earned $672 million worldwide and picked up six Oscar nominations, including best picture. Shyamalan remembered the studio wanting to market “Unbreakable” like a horror-thriller even though it was a superhero movie.

“If you deny what it is because you’re afraid of it being different, then you’re stealing all of its strength,” Shyamalan said. “They were like, ‘We had one of the biggest movies of all time and the same two people are making another movie. Let’s make it look like that movie.’ As opposed to what it was, which was the beginning of an entire genre. They didn’t realize it because they were too scared to say the words ‘comic book.'”

“That was literally the thing that was like, no one will go see a movie about a comic book,” he remembered the studio saying. “That was literally like, you can’t do it. And I’m like, ‘I love it! Maybe there’s other people that would think of this as myth as well and enjoy it.’ In my mind, it was a movie that was, ‘The guy is in a crash, an accident where everyone dies except him, and he doesn’t have a scratch on him, and someone says, “I know why that happened. You’re a real-life superhero.”‘ That’s the movie, but that was never said or sold.”

I can't say I care for the movie much myself, if only because I thought years ago that the ending risks making comic buffs look like insanely destructive saboteurs (referring to when it's revealed through telepathy that Samuel Jackson's character committed sabotage of railways, in example, in his quest to find somebody his polar opposite in terms of superhero endurability), but this certainly is telling of what went wrong with marketing, and come to think of it, still is, if we consider the political correctness that's since taken over. A similar mentality exists even today, where many Hollywooders don't want to market animation to adults because they don't think they'll look past the perception of being solely a children's medium, yet as seen in the past decade, they're more than perfectly willing to use cartoons as a means of pushing woke propaganda upon them.

So has anything changed? As far as live action movies are concerned, maybe not, and little's changed in the perception of animation either. Yet now that I think of it, of course it's surprising that, many years after the 1978 Superman movie with the late Christopher Reeve, such a mentality still held in the minds of various film and TV producers. The comics movies in the past 15 years may have been a turning point, but now, as the recent shift to woke propaganda makes clear, they've gone from a decent turn to way round the bend, and as recent examples make clear, it has cost the Marvel/DC film producers dough at the box office already. If the past decade's films looked promising for the reception, it's changed considerably now.

Labels: history, msm propaganda