The last "superhero/comic" movie I saw in theaters was Batman Begins, which was before this whole ridiculous obsession with them.
Why is the general public so enamored with what should be a fringe/cult thing? I'm legitimately curious because I don't understand. Batman I get because there is some history there, but every random superhero gets a movie now and it sells big...
It is hard to believe you are really this clueless. As HavoX pointed out, many of these titles have been published for more than 40 years. That’s probably more years than you have been alive. That is a lot stories; they represent a long history of readers and generations of readers. Newsflash: a lot more people are interested in the comic/superhero genre than in bodybuilding.
Here you are poking around the “fringe/cult” thing of bodybuilding, but how many bodybuilding films can you name beyond pumping I, II and Generation Iron? If those movies made a lot of money at the box office there would be a whole genre of them. There aren’t. People aren’t interested despite the fact that bodybuilding has also been around for a long time. Just one or two of these movies has generated more interest and income than all of bodybuilding has in its entire history. As entertaining and distracting as super powers can be (none in the case of Batman) the genre is really about explorations of humanity: what we value and why. What we prioritize and why. The choices we make and why. Typically, these stories are focused on young people because young people are still in the throes of trying to figure out what life is all about. That experience (or the memory of that experience) is something huge swaths of the “general public” identifies with. If you don’t get it… well, there are probably a lot of other things that you don’t get.
An interest in comics has been a rite of passage for literally millions of young people. As for why these movies have taken off now. Technology in the film business has only now gotten to the point when special effects folks can represent these characters and manifest their powers in ways that are compelling on screen. There were early live action versions of films like Fantastic Four. But the special effects were so bad most of those films were never distributed and/or they made no money.
Are there new or random characters? Sure, but some of these characters that you think of as random probably have a longer history than you do. If you are not interested so be it. You can always go watch Pumping Iron again.
