Sales figures from www.comichron.com.
In the month following the hugely popular Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie release, the Remender-penned Captain America solo comic book posted its worst sales since launch, shedding more than 4000 readers (>10%) and falling more than ten ranks.
Way to pull in all those potential new fans!
His sales were tanking since issue 6. Journey into Mystery Featuring Sif sold 10,000 copies more and it was cancelled on the 10th issue.
The drop from #1 to #2 cracks me up. I’m sure there’s a drop every time there’s a #1, but I bet its not usually this steep.
It’s almost like nobody cares to read about Steve Rogers in an alien dystopian landscape with none of his friends.
Steve on his own is fine.
As long as he has a sweet van, a vendetta against the government, and a hobo beard.
Remender missed that part of the ‘steve gets SAAAAAAAAAAAD and runs away from home’ arcs. You know, the fun part.
Also the lady killing. Puts a damper on things.
Okay, so some back of the napkin math. (Caveats all over the place for the math. I wanted to see how this worked out.)
Cap 2 made 95mil it’s opening weekend domestically. At $15 a ticket average (regular tickets are around $9 but it also opened in IMAX/3D so I’m gonna skew high), that’s 6,333,333 people who saw the movie that weekend. Assume (generously) that the hard core fans saw it twice, so let’s knock off a third of that. That’s 4.2 million warm bodies that went to see the movie. From the chart it looks like sales are around 36,000 copies. [I’m going to skip the absolute byzantine ways that comic sales are counted. I don’t know if this chart includes digital or not, if returns were counted, ect.]
But, based on that and assuming everyone who buys the comic went opening weekend (a fallacy but let’s go there), 1 in 111 viewers bought the comic. It was a little tough to track down something about seating capacity but the numbers I saw were 150 to 300. The megaplex I went to had Cap2 in the biggest capacity theaters they had.
What does that mean? Well, for one thing it means that there were probably 3 people in the room that could have bought Cap #21. And a whooooolllllleeeeee lotta people that hadn’t.
That, as a comic book fan in general, sucks. I love comics and think they are a great medium for a lot of people. They are (or can be) accessible in ways that a textual heavy book isn’t. It bridges the gap between text and pictures and in the best books, melds the two together.
It does look like there was a tiny bump between 18 and 19. Probably all those folks who went to the movies then went to their LCS (or who had never been in one before) and said ‘I just saw Captain America. Can I have the book with him in it?’ And they got handed #19 (and probably a few back issues if the store could afford to stock them). None of those people came back for #21 – and some of those that had been getting it stopped getting it.
Are comics for everyone? No. My daughter can’t read comics, the format just doesn’t work for her brain. But .00056% of the movie going audience that weekend is the same audience (with all the caveats above) for Remender’s Captain America title.
That’s so small I’m pretty sure that’s statistically insignificant.
(and this is probably a derail from the bigger point except not, because comics COULD be relevant to culture again except they say shitty things and people aren’t putting up with that any more, at least not as much).
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