You’re in a room filled with 3500 people and their all excited to see your project. They scream as the stars come out, they scream as clips are shown. The internet is abuzz with how wonderful the project is and how it will become the next big hit.

I’m sure that was the thinking the producers of Scott Pilgrim felt after they left Comicon. Their presence was everywhere; including an obviously expensive banner on the side of one of the hotels. It was like the Cannes Film Festival and Scott Pilgrim was the darling of the week. With a sneak preview that same week that generated great word of mouth, there was no doubt the movie was going to sell well.

With the uninitiated with Comicon, which seems to be a whole lot of producers who prefer to believe their own hype, the crowd reaction and the sheer number of people tends to inflate the expectations of filmmakers. The scenario described about Scott Pilgrim was repeated last year with Kick-Ass and before with Watchmen. With the exception of Watchmen, the comics are little known outside of a niche of the comic book market. A room filled with 3500 screaming fans can be difficult to replicate in 3000+ theaters. Even with Watchmen being a better known book, it doesn’t have the name recognition of Spider-Man, Superman or Lord of the Rings.

This year there was a lot of talk about branding products and it seems producers are so fixated on branding the product rather than putting out a good product. So what if you can sell shirts, glasses, and toys. All of that will make money, but at the end of the day if people aren’t seeing the movie, the little trinkets being sold end up supporting the cost of the movie rather than supplementing it.

As someone I know pointed out, Scott Pilgrim was less Lord of the Rings and more Ghost World, but the marketing people, the producers, the people who had to sell this little known comic to the general public, decided to build up the film to be larger than what it was. While the movie Eat, Pray, Love was another well hyped movie from a book many people, especially men, didn’t see, it did a decent amount of business its first week out. It had a huge star, but it played low key in terms of promotions.

What has happened with comic book adaptations is everyone is looking for a blockbuster. Not that you shouldn’t shoot for the rafters, but sometimes getting a solid single or double can be rewarding. I know that it is tough to justify that when you spend huge amounts of money for giant wall banners, trying to convince a somewhat skeptical crowd this is the greatest thing in the world. Going back to the naïve nature of producers going to Comicon, and this pains me to write, but as much as comic fans want to be cool and sophisticated, we aren’t far removed from the stereotypes in The Big Bang Theory. To see anything we cherish treated with some respect will make us fans, no matter how questionable the material is. As an example I saw a sizable line of people waiting to get an autograph of the man who played Dr. Doom in the Fantastic Four movie.

OK, let that sink in a bit because I’m not talking about the film with Jessica Alba. I’m talking about the low budget film produced by Roger Corman many years before the modern take. In a word, it was terrible and the actor playing Doom was the REAL Doom, not the industrialist with a complex that was passed off in the Alba movie; but there he was fielding questions and talking to fans. Those same fans who would slog through a terrible adaptation of The Fantastic Four (both versions) are unfortunately not the people you want to pin your hopes and dreams on if you need to make millions of dollars that you’ve sunk into a movie.

The bottom line is not all movies, especially comic book adaptations, are going to generate the kind of money that makes box office records. Comic book films are getting expectations they can’t generate because the initial audience that sprung the hit is relatively small to begin with. There was a lot of bragging that Scott Pilgrim, the comic, sold 100000 first run copies of the last book in the series. While that is impressive in today’s comic book market, it’s not something to get excited about. I did a comparison of the sales of Eat, Pray Love and for the week ending August 1 the book sold 94000 copies. Again, that was for ONE week! This year they sold 721000 copies, obviously because of interest in the movie, and last year they sold 333000 copies. Different genres to be sure but they both are trying to make money in movies. I would rather count on a base of 333000 copies sold rather than 100000. Oh, when the book was at its peak in 2007, hardcover, paperback and audio sales topped almost 2.5 million copies. Just as another comparison, I checked the sales for Watchmen and in 2008 sales was 308000 and for 2009 it was 424000 and those numbers might be slightly under actual sales according to the information I gathered.

Had Scott Pilgrim been a smaller film, and by smaller I mean without all the hype buildup of it being the next big thing, it might have stood a chance of gathering an audience. With the numbers it received it will be looked at as a failure.