'Batman' begins rush at store
By Matt Shaw
Published in News on June 20, 2005 1:45 PM
"Batman" made a triumphant return over the weekend, which is good news for Gotham City and a Goldsboro shop owner.
The new film, "Batman Begins," was tops at the box office, grossing more than $46 million and earning nearly unanimous good reviews.
The bat-buzz has more people heading into Heroes Are Here, Goldsboro's only comic-book store, and looking for more stories about the Caped Crusader.
"I've seen a lot of new faces in the past two weeks, more kids but also adults," said Eddie Sutton on Friday. Those numbers increased after the movie opened last Wednesday.
"Everyone has said that the movie is at least as good as, if not better than, they expected," Sutton said.
Popular items have included tradebooks or graphic novels, which tell complete stories as opposed to many monthly comic books.
Still, it hasn't been as wild as 1989 when "Batman," starring Michael Keaton, opened. That movie was wildly popular, eventually grossing $251 million in the U.S. and $413 million worldwide.
"I've never seen anything like that," Sutton said with a smile. "That entire summer anything with a bat symbol on it was gone. We couldn't get it in the shelves fast enough. It was amazing."
A number of comic-book movies have come and gone since then -- the two Spider-Man films, "X-Men" and "X2," the three "Blade" movies have been some of the hits. "Hulk," "Catwoman" and "Hellblazer" weren't.
But even some of the duds have had their fans.
"Believe it or not, we sold a lot of Daredevil trades after that movie came out," he said. But when that movie's sequel, "Elektra," came out, "we may have sold three books."
Now Sutton's nervously waiting for "Fantastic Four" to open later this month. TV ads are already giving glimpses of the Thing, Human Torch, Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic.
"It's going to be interesting to see how it translates to the screen," he said. "It's really neat to see these characters done well in live action, and what they've shown looks good."