SOMETIMES, the safe choice is the risky choice. Hollywood has learned that, for the time being at least, comic-book movies are gold. After the disastrous performance of 1997’s Batman and Robin, movie studios turned away from comics. Then Avi Arad came to power at Marvel, the giant comic publisher, and embarked on a campaign to woo them back.

Arad’s first Hollywood co-production, X-Men, was released in 2000 with much success. (Arad’s first comic-book movie was actually the 1998 Blade, but while it was based on a Marvel character, it wasn’t a Marvel Studios production.) With the box-office performance of X-Men ($296 million in worldwide receipts versus production costs of only $75 million), the floodgates opened. Since then Arad has pushed Marvel characters onto the screen at an impressive rate: Spider-Man (2002), Daredevil (2003), X-Men 2 (2003), Hulk (2003), and The Punisher (more on this below).