All Purpose Box Office Thread - $657.9 million worldwide

This whole situation is similar to the comic book business in the 1960's. In the 1950's DC owned superhero comics. They were by far the most popular. they produced numerous titles aimed at 8-10 year old kids. That was fine, I happen to love the superhero comics of that era.

But in the early 1960's Marvel suddenly surpassed them. People were shocked that Marvel superhero books could sell more than DC (just like people are shocked that Marvel movies are selling more tickets than DC).

I recently saw a documentary about comics where a guy who worked for DC at the time recalled a meeting where the boss came in and held up a Spider-Man comic and proclaimed "This book has a kid talking to his aunt for 2 pages!! How are they beating us?"

The fact is Marvel did new things. A teenager with the powers of the most revolting creature on Earth is a hero? A family with no masks, no capes, no secret identities and 1 is a hideous rock creature? A giant green rage monster is a superhero? Superheroes with mundane everyday problems? And so on. Marvel tried something different and it overtook the established and extremely popular DC superheroes. They also aimed it a different audience, tweens and early teenagers but it turned out that the books became a huge hit all the way up to college age consumers.

The same thing has happened in the movies. DC has owned superhero movies since the 1970's. In the early 2000's there were some challenges to DC supremacy in the form of X-Men and Spider-Man. Then Marvel studios tried something new with the carefully planned shared universe. They also updated their characters without "reinventing" them so long time fans wouldn't be upset. Marvel used creative marketing strategies as well. They also used that famous "Marvel Formula" which is actually the action movie formula that can be traced all the way back to "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) and "Gunga Din" (1939).

No doubt, someday DC will pull ahead again but it is not that shocking that Marvel is currently in the lead regardless of how "iconic" the Justice League is.