Franchised Superheroes & the Financialization of Filmmaking

Franchised Superheroes & the Financialization of Filmmaking

A talk by Professor Shawna Kidman (UC San Diego)

Friday, March 4
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm ET
Virtual event on Zoom

For decades, comic books were a source of speculation in Hollywood; film adaptation rights were bought, sold, and collateralized, but rarely ever greenlit for production. That changed in the early 2000s, when studios found new investment strategies that turned superheroes from risky bets into surefire blockbusters. This talk details this recent film and comic book industry history, and explains why great stories and characters will never be as important in Hollywood as great financial structures. As the film industry reorients around streaming platforms and conglomerates expand their holdings, the way media corporations decide to leverage debt, control stock prices, and speculate on intellectual property will play an ever-greater role in determining the shape of our cultural landscape.

Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego. Her research on the media industries has been published in The Journal of Film & Video, Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy-year convergence with the film and television business.