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Pete Kilmer: Ghost Rider opened to $45 million and Daredevil had a $40 million opening weekend. Ghost Rider finished at $115 million and Daredevil finished at $102 million domestic. So while not super blockbusters, they were successful in that they showed there is life in Marvel (and superhero properties) but they didn't have long life in theaters.

Iron Man and Dark Knight showed that if you hire quality people to direct, produce and write the movie and you put "actors" in the main roles, there is a damned good chance to catch something special. It's like Les said, it truly is all about quality.

Now with Marvel Studios at the forefront of their characters (except Spidey, X-men, and the Fantastic Four properties) they can have, at the writing stage, people from Marvel Comics look over stuff and make suggestions that the filmmakers can either use or discard. Favreau used the Marvel writers and look what happened.

Time/Warner was smart in the hiring of Christopher Nolan as the guy to run the Dark Knight project. He and his brother along with David Goyer (who's got some serious comic book movie cred as a writer,director and producer) wrote two fantastic projects with Dark Knight and Batman Begins and made smart, smart casting choices and look what happened. But looking at the Superman Returns project, there was no one from DC Comics to raise their hand and say, "Uhhh...excuse me, there is no need to redo the first Superman movie and make him a Super-stalker." That was poor planning.

Scott Lumley: We've really touched on something that I've given a lot of thought to. Because in my mind, two of the top five superhero films of all time were released this summer (Dark Knight and Iron Man for those keeping track). In my mind the others are Spider-Man 2, Blade and Hellboy.

For the longest time, I've always thought that if you were making a superhero film, you needed to display something that was just amazing on that screen and not treat it like a joke. (You are allowed to make if funny per se, but you can't be actively mocking it.) I used to tell my friends that one day we would get Hulk vs Thing on the big screen and then the rest of the world would "get it". Clearly at that point I wasn't "getting it". Because it's not about the big musclebound guy beating on the other big musclebound guy, it's about being able to invest yourself in that character, for whatever reason, and then cheering as they take down the bad guy. And hopefully the bad guy is as interesting or even moreso than the good guy. Rise of the Silver Surfer had the amazing chase scene between the Human Torch and Silver Surfer but they didn't have an awesome villain (they actually did, but they blew it) and they didn't treat the characters respectfully. Ghost Rider had the most spot-on special effects I've ever seen for any Marvel character but the script was ridiculous and the bad guys had little appeal. And the less we talk about Electra the better.

It seems that the formula for a good superhero movie is as follows. (Solid concept + respectful, well-written script)*Talent + Action. If you have reasonable amounts of all of those things, you're likely to have a good superhero movie.

And yes, I noticed that you could probably apply the formula to any decent action film. Thank you for noticing. Someone please forward that to Jerry Bruckheimer.

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