This is an update of my original survey of the average Rotten Tomatoes ranking of Marvel and DC comic book movies. The two changes are:

1. I’ve included the movies that have come out in the past year (X-Men: First Class, Thor and Green Lantern).
2. A few people thought that it would be fairer to look at only the current wave of superhero movies (starting in 2000 with X-Men).  I’ve added a section comparing both companies’ performance post-2000.

Summary

• Including the older movies, the average Rotten Tomato score was 50.2% for DC and 58.1% for Marvel.  If we look only at the modern movies, the gap narrows somewhat.  Since 2000, DC has averaged 54.8% and Marvel has averaged 59.9%.

• Marvel has been having more critical success with more series.  Since 2000, DC’s non-Batman movies have averaged 47.1%.  Since 2000, Marvel’s non-Spiderman movies have averaged 55.8% and its non-X-Men movies have averaged 56.4%.

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Judging by ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, DC movies do almost as well on average (although its bombs tend to be uniquely awful).

For the sake of convenience and clean numbers, I took the top 20 grossing movies from each publisher and then gathered their Rotten Tomato rankings, which are averages of hundreds or thousands of reviews.  (A RT ranking isn’t a perfect measure of quality, but it’s probably pretty accurate).

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You can see the Associated Press’ take here and The Wall Street Journal has more here (subscription required?).   I have a few thoughts below.

• Disney is paying roughly $50 per share, which is a 29% premium over Friday’s closing.  If you own Marvel stock, you will come out ahead quite nicely on this.  It was trading around $25 earlier this year.
• I am cautiously optimistic that Disney knows how to buy a successful firm without ruining what made it successful.  For example, Pixar’s movies didn’t drop in quality after the Disney buyout.  (Nor have they released a lot of straight-to-DVD sequels to successful movies).
• I doubt this will have a noticeable impact on Marvel’s products.  Even the movies.
• I think Disney is the biggest loser here.  It’s betting 4 billion dollars that it can leverage Marvel’s characters better than Marvel did.  I’m skeptical.

GAH.

MY EYES ARE ON FIRE.