Comic Book Overkill

Nerd rant alert...

I have a fear that by the end of this post most of you will be shouting hypocrisy, and more than a few of you will be calling for blood.

Why? well because I'm going to be discussing an issue I have with the veritable pile up of comic book media visiting screens soon. Because that is what the genre is becoming - a pile up - and very soon I fear it is going to be a car crash.

There are just too many superhero related films, TV shows, tie-in merchandise and video games coming out in the near (and worryingly distant future). In this year we will have:

• Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man and Fantastic Four in films, 
• Gotham, Flash, Marvel's Agents of Shield, Marvel's Agent Carter, Arrow and Marvel's Daredevil on TV.
• and relatively less in video games with just Batman: Arkham Knight (although the lack of games is probably due to the shocking history of superhero games.

That is quite a lot hitting our screens, but 2015 is relatively quiet in comparison to the upcoming years. Take just next year for instance. 2016 will feature eight cinematic films and the amount of TV shows is set to increase too. This amount is going to be the standard amount from next year until at least 2020.

Oh, and these only reflect the two major comic book publishers, DC and Marvel's, intellectual property. There are many more lesser known comic book tie-ins coming.

Now I am someone who enjoys comics, so I should love these films right? 

Well yes I do, and you can read my opinion on the latest Avengers here. 

But I can't help feeling that the market is becoming over saturated and the franchises will soon sink. Even I'm getting fed up of seeing superheros plastered on everything, so surely the average non-nerd is too. At the very least people will be getting confused as to whom fights with whom and why certain heroes aren't appearing in certain franchises.

Film fatigued can effect fans and casual watchers alike.

And this fatigue can harm how  the fans feel towards a film. I had this feeling as I went into Avengers: Age of Ultron. The Avengers franchise has the had the threat of the villain Thanos hanging over it since Avengers Assemble, and with every addition the end game has been hinted at more and more. However the payoff for this will not come until Avengers Infinity War Pt. 2, which is scheduled for release in 2019.

Thanos is hardly a threat when he has to sit in that throne for another eight films.

Don't get me wrong I enjoyed Avengers: Age of Ultron, and definitely the Guardians of the Galaxy, but I still went in feeling that it could be nothing more than filler with an end goal far out of sight. You could argue that it is my own fault for reading everything and everything I find, that I have spoilt it for myself. But whether I know about it or not doesn't change the fact that there are so many films coming out.

And for those who are only casual fans the amount of films must be confusing. Without doing the reading that I mentioned above it will be hard to know what films tie into what. This confusion only gets worse when we consider the two Quicksilvers that are hitting the screens. 

If your an avid fan or not it won't be long before people tire of superheroes. At which point this fad will end as it does with all popular culture. The problem is that by over-saturating the screens the studios are bursting the fad sooner, bringing on their own demise. At the rate they are going at now I worry if anyone will be interested by the time that Avengers: Infinity wars pt. 2 releases, let alone the scheduled films for the 2020s.


Comic timeline photo from Outerplaces, Hypocrite meme from quickmeme, Thanos image from Screenrant.