The 2015 summer movie season is coming to a sour end. Overall, the industry did okay: not record breaking, but not terrible. Jurassic World, Furious 7, and Avengers: Age of Ultron all released this summer, and all three currently reside in the top 10 grossing films of all time. Hard to complain.

And yet, so dismal is the latest salvo in the superhero genre that it has thrown a wet blanket over the entire situation that is Hollywood summer cinema. That Fantastic Four is a dismal mess is by now well known. So bad is this move that piling on brings no pleasure. Fox and Josh Trank knew what they had, a $100 million dollar ($200 M if you add marketing to the production budget) failure. To no one’s surprise, it failed.

The hopes for Fantastic Four were high, for the studio and Trank. Fox had visions of a new successful franchise. One that would live on to see its own sequels and cross-over into Fox’s other superhero titles, including the X-Men movie universe (the next of which is 2016’s Deadpool). Trank, meanwhile, was looking to build his sci-fi reputation, which he kicked off with the very good Chronicle, by inserting a cool genre film into the world of oversized superhero movies.

But surely, the resulting film and box-office failure of Fantastic Four will alter Fox’s plan. This is the third, and biggest, flop that Fox has made with these characters (2005, Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). At some point, Fox has to realize that Marvel’s original comic book superhero team just isn’t a good fit for the big-screen, right?

Wrong.

After Fantastic Four opened to an embarrassing $26 Million dollars in the United States, Fox domestic distribution chief Chris Aronson told the Hollywood Reporter: “We remain committed to these characters and we have a lot to look forward to in our Marvel universe.” Yes. That means that plans for a sequel remain in motion.

So we have not seen the last of the Fantastic Four on the big-screen. Trank’s movie is the fourth live-action adaptation of the characters (Roger Corman produced one in the 1990s that was never released. It’s on Youtube, and tremendously bad) who seem so natural in the comic books and so unfit for the screen.

I wish we could say that Fox, by pursuing yet another FF film that no one is asking for, was making a bad business decision, that throwing good money after bad movies was a sign that they were missing the message. But that’s not the case. Not anymore.

Fox is following a tried-and-true industry model that has worked for the past 50 years. That industry is just not the movies, it’s comics.

The superhero comic book industry has been doing for half a century what the movie business has been doing for about 15 years: committing to characters. Characters are what have sold comic books ever since the inception of the superhero. Readers have favorite writers, of course, or artists. But the model has always remained the same. If a book is failing, fire the creative team and start over. Repeat. Forever if necessary.

This is why Marvel pitted such a vociferous fight against allowing creators ownership of their creations. Marvel must own everything involved in their massive universe. If an individual owned a character, then that character might be lost, and with it any future profits on toys, cross-overs, and adaptations.

Once you have a character, you must commit. It’s what Fox said immediately after the latest iteration of FF bombed. “We’re still committed to these characters.” What you make is not the point; what matters is the names on the poster.

Being a creative person in superhero comic tends to be a never ending battle pitting artists against the business case. That’s not an overstatement. The Untold History of Marvel Comics, by Sean Howe, is essentially a 300 page review of who worked for Marvel, when, and why they left. In most cases artists left because they were fired, or fed up with the company due to a lack of acknowledgement (Marvel owned everything anyone ever created without paying royalties or giving artists’ rights) or a loss of creative control over characters and stories.

The poor treatment of creators in the big two comics publishers-where superheroes have always dominated-is a long documented problem. It starts at the very origin of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, co-creators of so many of Marvel’s most famous titles (including FF). Lee, the writer and showman, has worked with Marvel ever since. But Kirby, the artist perhaps most responsible for the visual style of superhero comics, left the company in a public break over ownership and artist representation. Kirby would would fight with Marvel for years, in public and in court, to get the ownership of his work. A fight that in his lifetime, he never won.

That fight has been on repeat ever since. Arists and writers come and go. Some stick longer than others (Chris Claremont on X-Men) but that just makes their departure even more jarring (Chris Claremont on X-Men). They can succeed or fail but they are never necessary. The Marvel Universe is about superheroes. It is not about creators. And now that the Marvel Universe is on the big-screen, the model seems to have followed.

Maybe this is not news. Spider-Man is getting his third reboot in 15 years. Green Lantern will appear again in DC’s movie universe, despite the disaster that was Green Lantern. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out terrible, it took Fox only four years to forget that ever happened and make The Wolverine. And that wasn’t even a reboot. It was just a mostly unrelated Wolverine movie that starred the same character.

Now Fantastic Four has been rebooted after failure, only to produce another failure, only to get a re-commitment from the studio. What can we take from this history other than the lesson that failure doesn’t matter. Not really. Not to the studio. Only characters matter.

Superheroes, comic book adaptations, and genre series are the heart of the movie business. Finding a successful action franchise is a quest that every studio is tasked with, and the fear of missing out on the next big film property paralyzes creativity.

This year, creators have come out of superhero projects and talk like they’ve just left a meat-grinder. Joss Whedon made two Avengers films for Marvel, grossing $1.5 and 1.39 Billion respectively. Two of the most successful films of all time and both were critical successes. They are, for many, the benchmark of the superhero movie industry. When Whedon finished making Avengers: Age of Ultron, he had this to say about the process:

Well, I have been to the other side of the mountain. I gotta say, it’s been dark. It’s been weird. It’s been horrible. About a month and a half ago, I said goodbye to my kids, and I’ve been living in Burbank next to the studio. I feel every day like, I didn’t do enough, I didn’t do enough, I didn’t do enough. I wasn’t ready. Here’s failure. Here’s failure. Here’s compromise. Here’s compromise.

This is what it’s like to make a very good superhero movie, for an experienced director. Is it any wonder that Josh Trank, on his second project, struggled with Fantastic Four?

Trank’s behavior may have been part of the problem. That tweet he sent the night before the movie opened was a stupid move no matter what. But the message that should be taken away from the Fantastic Four debacle is not that Trank is insufferable. It’s that, once again, a superhero comic book adaptation has gone into development, produced a failure, and left another artist flailing.

Add to this that Marvel removed Edgar Wright from Ant-Man, after he spent years on the project, because of supposed creative differences, and it’s clear that the business of movies is ever-more resembling the business of comics. Its characters, not creators, that matter.

If Fox makes Fanstastic Four 2, we can safely say this is now true in Hollywood: making movies that are worth watching is less of a priority than making movies that have the right characters. It means that green-light decisions at Fox are made based on whether the words “fantastic” and “four” will appear in the title of a movie.

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