Courtesy of Franklin Harris comes this article claiming that Marvel stockholders dumped their holdings after The Hulk did less business than expected. I dunno, man–the all-time record-holding June opening weekend seems pretty good to me, and I’m not sure that anyone thought this movie was as much of a sure thing as, say, Spider-Man (no challenging art-film moves in that bad boy) or even the X-Men sequel, which had a built-in audience of people who liked what they saw in the first one. It’s also conceivable that folks are experiencing some “blockbuster fatigue” at this point in the season, especially after so many moviegoers felt that they got burned by The Matrix Reloaded. Seems to me that unless these stockholders were especially squeamish, which doesn’t seem likely considering they bought stock in Marvel Comics, The House of Badly Conceived and Executed Business Ideas, they were just looking for a convenient date to dump stock, and right after Marvel’s final big release for the season was as good a time as ever. But let the gloom and doom commence, as it does after every Marvel movie that fails to make $200 million its opening weekend.
(Note: I was half-jokingly accused this weekend of colluding with Dirk Deppey, to whom this entry is dedicated, to drive up one another’s real estate. Bullroar, I say!)