According to Mark Dippe, director of Spawn: “The most successful movies are the ones that involve new visual effects techniques, and Hollywood is chasing after fresh meat like a pack of wolves.” Superheroes, with their propensity to fly through the air, scale buildings, fell cities and set fire to their own heads, are ideally suited to effects-driven filmmaking.

Neil Gaiman, author of the massively popular Sandman comic book series, has said that he used to think that comics were superior to movies because they have “an infinite special-effects budget.”

Now that movies, for all intents and purposes, also have an infinite special-effects budget, there's no limit to what Hollywood will bring (or will try to bring) to the screen. The Dark Knight cost $1.2 million per minute to make; Spiderman 3, perhaps the most expensive movie of all time,cost roughly $2 million per minute.

Of course, given the fact that superheroes are “a worldwide export...existing in 30 languages and in more than 60 countries," the hope is that they'll more than make up for it in global ticket sales, merchandising and licensing opportunities. Their iconic images can be plastered on everything from Band-Aids to lunchboxes to jockstraps.

As a result, many studios are closing their art-house labels and producing bigger, louder, faster -- but fewer -- movies each year.