Something has happened, and is still happening, in the mainstream entertainment industry; the Nerds have taken over. Take a look at cinema in particular; Super-hero movies, the return of many genre movies and tongue in cheek b movies and comic-book licences a plenty. Hell a Batman film caused an uproar when it was NOT nominated for best picture.
Of course all of this has been going on for a while but the quantity and most importantly the quality of much "Geek cinema" has improved dramatically so much so that a "Thor" movie can make a decent profit and get in the high 70s on aggregation sites. There have been a few financial 'bombs' (at least as seen by the studio) on the part of some very good movies, see; the sublime Scott Pilgrim and its much lower than expected takings, and on the part of some terrible movies, see; The Green Lantern but on the whole the studios appetite seems undamaged for movies aimed squarely at the 12-30 something 'geek' male audience. The thing that wets the studio's appetite is that a move like "Thor", if they pitch it right, will appeal to anyone from the age of 10 right up to mid 40s nerds and almost every age group in between not to mention parents and grand-parents who take their kids to see it. Your 10-15 audience will want to see it because it looks awesome and is rated low enough for all involved to be comfortable with them viewing it, plus it has a dude with a giant hammer and explosions and junk. Your 15-18 audience will want to see it for mainly the same reasons but will feel comfortable going on their own because the movie is not seen as "just for kids". Your 18-30s will feel comfortable for the same reason but might also be existing fans of the on-going comic and have the time and disposable income to want to see it possibly multiple times. Your 30-40s age-group might have been a fan of the older comics and so the licence has geek nostalgia appeal to them.
You can please many demographics without really compromising your movie simply because so many people see no barrier to them viewing it as long as you make the appeal broad enough. Now this brings up issues of movies that started out intending to be one rating being brutally edited or stunted to fit a lower one (see Red Riding Hood, that movie wanted to be WAY more sexy/freaky than it was ever allowed to be and suffered dearly for it) but fortunately this seems to to happen too often in the Super Hero genre.
But how did we get here? The main reason i see is the continued quality of Marvel Studios offerings since Iron Man. They have not been the sole contributor to the rise but their steady efforts since 2008 have really underpinned the whole genre with an air of quality, consistency and class. 5 years before things had looked a little rockier with their properties; 2003's hulk seemed almost embarrassed to be a super hero movie instead pulling a bait-and-switch with a movie about daddy issues. The idea that having a movie hold up based on a "Big green dude tear shit up" still didn't quite sit right in the collective consciousness of the good folks over and Universal. The result was a critical and commercial flop and contributed to the, in retrospect excellent, idea of Marvel taking their toys back. 2008's hulk was widely seen as an apology for the earlier effort and sent a clear sign that marvel was both serious about keeping their own properties and dead serious about the idea of a unified universe.
There has also been a glimmer of big concept Sci-Fi peeping its head above water; inception and the ajustment beuro seem to be actively harking back to the grand ideas of the 1960s sci-fi writers to deliver pretty amazing ideas. The asthetic also seems to be grounded in this era, rich colours and swave locals. Heres to hoping we see some of the great work of Phillip K Dick make it to the sceen without all the pandering that has been layered on it before. If Hunter Thompson's Rum Dairy can make it then why not a well crafted "The Man in the High Castle"?
The place we stand now is pretty exciting, The Avengers Movie is gearing up and we see something that a decade ago would have been laked out of the building; a straight faced translation of large scale interconnected comic book continuity put into a fully blown blockbuster. The future seems set on an even brighter horizon; the return of actual ideas to hollywood.
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