I've heard it said that a geek is someone that does to excess what a normal person does casualy. As such, geek culture and non-geek culture are usually at odds. A geek will look at a premis, cast list, director and overall hype and use that to decide to go see a movie or not, while a normal person will go "Michael Cera....pass, Stalone blowing shit up...cool."
Let's make one thing clear, at leas some of the Dark Knights success has to come with that fact it's friggin' Batman: a household name practically worldwide. The fact it came out well, and somewaht inteligent was a bonus that brought a lot of people back, but that might not have happened with a less rocognizable character or an original. (Hollywood's prone to this, like how most of the marketing for inception pimped it as by the director of the Dark Knight.) And I say somewhat inteligent because while well told, it was just a basic hero / villan story that made the afterschhol special point of there being good and evil in everybody to some degree. Good guy won, no one leaves the theatre uncomfortable.
Watchmen on the other hand wasn't well known outside of comic and other geek circles meaning a lot of people would pass it over. Those that took the plunge got a very nihlistic piece without clear cut heroes, villans, or morals.
But back to point, as much as geek cutlre has seen some success, it's been the more recognizable / watered down have have been the sucesses. People saw Lord of the Rings because it was Lord of the Rings, and if it was released as say, Dragonlance, a lot of it's sales would have been nonexistant. Iron Man may be geeky, buy it was also very audience friendly such that a non-geek would mistake it for just that year's sci-fi blockbuster attempt (the way no one knew Men in Black was a comic book first.) If we're just riding the coat tails of the popular crowd, the current spread of geek culture will end.
Or not. I was taught the theory was less survival of the fittest, and more survival of the most adaptable to their environment. As much as we'd like to drag normal people to geekdom, it won't happen overnight if at all, so we might need to make sure our geek movies are, like Dark Knight and Iron Man, made as much for the normals as they are for us, and more importantly, marketed to the normals. You keep hearing it. Scott Pilgrim missed it's marketng as people mistook it for a kids movie. Kick-Ass looked rather dopey in it's ad to the point of loking like a parody. They tried to appeal purely to the geek culture, and it failed as these indy projects really don't have the fanbase they seem. I know you know this. One of your game overthinker videos said the same thing about needing to apeal to the casual gamer market, and it's no different for films. Like I said, these aren't people that are going to look deeply into any project presented to them, and we may need to lead them in better directions a step at a time while not losing aspects that appeal to them.
As for Tron, I think the 3D will at least make sure it doesn't totally flop.
