Deadpool studio Fox won't depend just on superheroes
20th Century Fox has made A LOT of money on superheroes, thanks of Deadpool, X-Men and the Fantastic Four. (Well, maybe not so much the last one…)
However, the studio's boss is issuing a warning to Hollywood that it shouldn't just depend on flying heroes in capes to rake in big bucks at the box office. At this week's CineEurope in Barcelona, 20th Century Fox Film Chairman and CEO Stacey Snider urged fellow studios to consider to diversifying its blockbusters.
"The studios need to have a bigger appetite for big cinematic, tentpole-type entertainment that isn't necessarily based on branded material," Snider argued.
"When you think about The Greatest Showman…what we had to hang onto was that the music was incredible and that, if ever there was a person to be The Greatest Showman at Christmastime, it was Hugh Jackman. The same with The Martian – it was based on a book that was self-published. It was hardly a bestseller."
The executive warned her Hollywood colleagues that if their industry is content to rely "on caped crusaders", they risk a crash if the genre ever falters.
"If we don't continue to reach out to the folks that come more than just to see The Avengers, we are going to have just the weekend business," she argued.
It's an interesting stance, since Fox is currently working on an X-Force spin-off for Deadpool and multiple off-shoots from the X-Men universe.
"We want to continue, for example, with our X-Men movies and our Deadpool movies, but at the same time we have great success with a movie like Murder on the Orient Express or The Greatest Showman, where we are very mindful of speaking to this global audience, but not doing it in a way that in the past has homogenized all of the product," Snider said. "Where things fall off the cliff is when that bright consumer says, 'I have seen this movie'."
The studio is almost in the midst of bidding war between Comcast and Disney, that could see heroes like Deadpool and the X-Men join the Marvel Cinematic Universe if Disney is successful in its purchase.
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