{"id":244436,"date":"2025-10-27T23:25:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T23:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/244436\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T23:25:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T23:25:12","slug":"this-1999-magazine-about-superhero-movies-is-bonkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/244436\/","title":{"rendered":"This 1999 Magazine About Superhero Movies Is Bonkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are surely better superhero movies than 2000\u2019s\u00a0X-Men<\/a>, but there may not be a more important\u00a0comic book movie in the history of Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Yes, studios had attempted to turn comics into franchises before Fox made X-Men, and Warner Bros. had already had huge success with their\u00a0Superman\u00a0and\u00a0Batman\u00a0film series. Remember, though, where Superman and Batman were in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n

At that point, the Christopher Reeve\u00a0Superman saga had been defunct for over a decade, and Warners\u2019 first attempt to\u00a0reboot the Man of Steel flamed out in spectacular fashion when Tim Burton\u2019s\u00a0Superman Lives died a very premature death. In some ways, that was still a better outcome than what happened to the Batman franchise, which had become a laughingstock by the end of the decade thanks to\u00a0the absurd\u00a0Batman & Robin.\u00a0It was the era of\u00a0Steel\u00a0and\u00a0Spawn and The Shadow.\u00a0Those who wanted to believe that comic book movies were juvenile\u00a0junk had plenty of evidence to support their claims.<\/p>\n

There had never been a major Marvel<\/a> film in theaters at that point, and there was plenty of skepticism in the industry that such a thing was even possible. Fox had spent years trying to adapt Marvel\u2019s\u00a0X-Men comics, but the property\u2019s enormous cast of characters, elaborate super powers, and exaggerated costumes all proved difficult to translate into a single live-action feature. When they finally did it in the summer of 2000, and the film proved to be a major financial hit across multiple demographics, it completely changed how Hollywood producers viewed comics as source material.<\/p>\n

Which is\u00a0why I was so fascinated by\u00a0the debut issue of\u00a0Flix!,\u00a0which I recently acquired from\u00a0a friend.\u00a0Flix!\u00a0was a publication by the staff of\u00a0Wizard, the\u00a0leading magazine in the 1990s about the worlds of comics and superheroes.\u00a0Wizard\u00a0#99 from November of 1999\u00a0came\u00a0bagged with the first (and, as far as I can tell, only) issue of\u00a0Flix! Its cover features an image of Wolverine\u2019s claws with the caption \u201cIt\u2019s On! X-Men Begins Filming! The Full Scoop Inside! Entire Cast Revealed!\u201d<\/p>\n

Only the cast they reveal is not completely accurate \u2014 and a lot of the information contained inside is\u00a0incorrect,\u00a0either because\u00a0of bad intel or films\u00a0that changed\u00a0drastically during their development. That almost makes\u00a0Flix!\u00a0a time capsule\u00a0from an alternate reality where\u00a0Jim Caviezel was nearly in\u00a0X-Men\u00a0and Arnold Schwarzenegger played\u00a0Doc Savage, as well as\u00a0a pretty compelling document of\u00a0a huge pivot point in the history of mainstream Hollywood. Join me on a look back\u00a0at a time when the very idea that a major studio\u00a0might create a Marvel movie was such a big deal\u00a0that someone\u00a0made an entire magazine\u00a0out of\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

A Look Inside Flix!, a Short-Lived Magazine Dedicated to Comic Book Movies From 1999<\/p>\n

The comic magazine Wizard tried to expand into comic book movies in the late 1990s with something called Flix!, all about the world of superheroes onscreen. 25 years later, it is a wild time capsule.<\/p>\n

READ MORE: 10 TV Shows That Survived the Netflix Curse<\/a><\/p>\n

Movies That Everyone Loves That Are Actually Bad<\/p>\n

Sorry, guys. We just can\u2019t get with the consensus on these popular but not-great movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are surely better superhero movies than 2000\u2019s\u00a0X-Men, but there may not be a more important\u00a0comic book movie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,54429,2015,337,14349],"class_list":["post-244436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-longform","tag-movie-news","tag-movies","tag-superheroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}