Todd McFarlane -

By: Dominick A. Miserandino

Comic Artist/Entrepreneur

Todd MacFarlane made his fame with comic books before comic heroes were big again. Since creating the best-selling Spawn character, Todd has gone on to make his mark in designing toys and creative consulting. Todd spoke with TheCelebrityCafe's Dominick Miserandino about the resurgence of comic book heroes on film. DM: From looking at your bio I see you're a busy man.

TM: It's all smoke and mirrors. I'm like the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. I show up every now and then to wave and everybody else does the work.

DM: It seems like there is a resurgence of super heroes on TV, in movies, a rise in comic book sells. Why now?

TM: When I was younger action movies were always the big genre. People were turning to those when I was collecting comics. When I was in high school collecting comic books meant you were mentally arrested. People were going to movies like James Bond and Star Wars. To me almost every action movie is essentially a comic book on screen doing goofy things no one could ever do in real life. It sort of began when Superman and Batman came out with Christopher Reeves and Michael Keaton. All of a sudden comic books could become action movies. Joe Public doesn't mind saying I went to see an action movie instead of saying I'm a geek comic book collector. I don't know. People are sort of waking up to it that we're all a sort of geek.

DM: So was your phone ringing the day after The Dark Knight opened?

TM: This year it ran big ten seconds after Iron Man opened. I don't think people ever saw Iron Man as an A-class character like Batman, Superman and Spider-Man. Iron Man was a notch behind then it suddenly comes out of the gate and opens with $70-80 million, and eventually earning 300 million. People realize they can make money and they start looking at all the B characters of the world. Now they're talking about coming out with Thor and Captain America.

DM: Are toys and products still of interest?

TM: It depends on the age audience. Transformers and Batman saw a spike. Other characters like Narnia and the last Indiana Jones movie, you see some interest but not what you'd expect. You can imagine a kid in the action figure aisle of a toy store and say you can have Batman with a big cape, or the big green guy, or Iron Man who shoots all over the place, or you can have a guy in khaki pants who's 60 years old. You can bet the eight year old is not going to pick the old guy in the khaki pants.

DM: Most of the recent comic book products aren't appropriate for kids like they used to be. I wouldn't take my kids to see The Dark Knight.

TM: It's an interesting phenomenon. When the Batman franchise first started with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton they sold a bunch of tickets and a bunch of toys. Then what happened was they got stuck saying 'Hey you know what? We need to make the movie have visuals in it that we can turn into toys.' By the third or fourth one it became almost a parody of itself. You had Mr. Freeze in the last one, the Riddler, and Poison Ivy-and I'm probably missing another villain in there-and then you had Batman, Robin and Batgirl. And all of a sudden you wondered how you went from Batman to this ensemble just to sell toys. But the toys stopped selling. Then a couple year back they came out with Batman Begins and someone said 'screw selling toys.' The audience now is ten years older so they made a movie for that older audience. They found that even by aging up the product they didn't hurt the toy sales. Even though Batman might not be appropriate for a six-year-old, six-year-olds still want Batman toys.

DM: Do the ancillary products have that much influence on the movies then?

TM: They used to. Way back when you came out with a movie you made your money domestically. The studios sold some rerun rights, but your biggest licensing came from the ancillary, namely toys because video games still hadn't gained the technology. Star Wars was probably the first phenomenon. Star Wars comes out and Star Wars toys make trillions of dollars. But now DVDs make a lot of money, and video games more so. The licensing part doesn't have the impact it once did so the studios stopped asking for all the opinions they once did and letting the toys drive the story.

DM: You've also created characters. Is there a market for what you do?

TM: Hollywood is greedy for superheroes and they're finding out there is only a handful of A guys and then there's a bunch of B, and countless C. For Superman and Batman somebody's already got those rights, somebody's already made those movies. The thing is, Superman and Batman were created in the 30s, Iron Man and the Hulk came out in the 60s. But in the 1970s nobody came out with any new characters. Nobody stocked an A guy in the 70s. That's why the character I wrote, Spawn, came out and sold all those books that it did.

DM: Why doesn't the good guy ever die?

TM: That's a good question. The funny thing is the studios have trained the movie goers of America to have a happy ending. They do test these all these movies and audiences come and go 'whoa, hold on a sec.' As bizarre as it is they know going in what the ending is going to be but they are still there for the ride anyways. And when they don't get the ending they've already anticipated they actually will critique the movie down, and I've seen studios literally re-shoot the endings because the original didn't test well. And so you have some brilliant movies that disappointed people because they didn't work. In mainstream movies you can't get away with it. Luckily with some of the R-rated movies that are a little bit adult you can. Look at some of the movies like The Departed where you go, yeah, the reason that movie worked was because they guys you thought who were going to get through it didn't quite work out the way you thought. I don't believe America is ready for a steady diet of movies like The Departed. We don't just appreciate those kinds of movies.

DM: So how did The Dark Knight, which has a dark ending, do so well?

TM: They tweaked it. They saw they weren't making money by the end of the franchise when it got down to part four with Jim Carey and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They sat it on the shelves and then somebody wondered how do we re-kick it? There was always an answer and a handful of us in comic books knew what the answer was: you gotta make it smarter than what it is. You gotta stop making it a toy movie. You gotta make a cold movie about a guy who dresses in black and scares the crap out of people at 3 o'clock in the morning. That's what he does. Get past all the heroic part of what Bruce Wayne does. He waits until 3 in the morning, dresses up in a big black cape and scares the crap out of the bad guys. So they tested it, not quite as far in The Dark Knight, and they found it worked. So what happens now is Christopher Nolan, who directed The Dark Knight, amps it up a little more and you get a maniacal Joker and everybody goes for the ride. At some point you have to say I know we lost a bunch of 7 and 8 year olds but we did gain some 5 million adults. At the economic level 5 million adult tickets are a lot more than 2 million kiddie tickets at the matinee price. And then you have to look at some toys but the DVDs, the anniversary DVD, the director's cut and all those things are sure to come out and you're making a whole lot more than selling that other crap.

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