M Night Shyamalan’s 2000 fantasy drama showed that superhero narratives can be told with patience and a straight face which changed the genre forever
If they gave awards for the dumbest expository title cards to open or conclude motion pictures – a lively ceremony, to be sure – 2000’s undisputed winner would have been Unbreakable. M Night Shyamalan’s superhero thriller begins with some fun facts about comic books, a then-70-year-old medium treated like a phenomenon as new and foreign to its time as internet porn.
“There are 35 pages and 124 illustrations in the average comic book. A single issue ranges in price from $1 to over $140,000. 172,000 comics are sold in the US every day. Over 62,780,000 each year. The average comic collector owns 3,312 comics and will spend approximately 1 year of his or her life reading them.” From the bizarre specificity of these questionably sourced statistics to the niggling incongruity that puts cents on one dollar amount and not the other to the impromptu multiplication lesson, it’s a precious gem of bad writing.