7 Beloved Comics That Would Make Terrible Movies

Comics and film are different media.

As much as the comic book industry has been driving a lot of Hollywood’s biggest movies over the last decade or so, and as much as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics will remind you that film is indeed a version of sequential art, just like comics (or at least it was, back when it was actually on film), not everything that works in a comic book can or should work in a movie, and vice versa.

Of course, for years, the discussion centered mostly around the idea that visual effects weren’t “up to snuff” yet to make the comics look good on screen, so now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has put lie to that idea (let’s be honest: Iron Man has never looked as cool in the comics as he does in the movies), the question becomes: are there still things that are unfilmable?

The constant conversation around Watchmen suggests that there are. The gruesome and bizarre finale of Watchmen was significantly altered for Zack Snyder’s controversial film adaptation, and for the most part, even the most hardcore comics purists basically shrugged and said, “Yeah. That couldn’t have worked in a movie.”

And that’s Watchmen. Arguably the best single superhero story ever told, and named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best books of the 20th Century.

Certainly there’s got to be some of the more disposable, serialized comics that also wouldn’t make for great movies, right?

But let’s ignore the really forgettable stuff, or the outright bad stuff. Nobody wants a list of terrible comics that would make terrible movies. Of course they would: the source material is already not good. Instead, we wanted to take a look at some fan-favorite stories — including some that people have hoped or lobbied for film versions of over the years — and look at why they wouldn’t work as a film, or at least why to make a good film, it would alienate the hell out of the core audience who are the ones most invested in the stories to begin with.

So, as always, read on and let us know in the comments whether or not you agree!

52

One of the biggest problems with adapting any given storyline faithfully is that when it’s set in a universe with 75 years of history, there’s going to necessarily be some stuff cut out for simplicity’s sake.

And in the case of a story like 52, that’s a problem.

First of all, its primary cast are people about whom the moviegoing audience know little or nothing. To really understand Steel, you have to either recap the Reign of the Supermen or give him another origin. Booster Goldis pretty complex, too. Renee Montoya, for the purposes of 52, is treated as a legacy hero whose mentor is dying — and audiences don’t know who she is, really, or The Question. On and on.

Also: The slow-burn of 52 is a big part of what made it work. That, and the audience’s willingness to go in for anyone or anything (holy crap! Look at that obscure New God who hasn’t appeared since the ’70s! And it’s Animal Man’s origin reboot!) that made the series such a runaway hit. In the movies, that’s unlikely to work.

All in all, in spite of being widely regarded as one of DC’s best crossover events since Crisis on Infinite Earths, 52 is likely not filmable — and definitely not as a feature film. Maybe it could work as a TV series, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

CIVIL WAR (the real one)

We’ll skirt around the typical Marvel/DC shouting match as much as possible here while acknowledging that DC fans weren’t entirely unfair when they pointed out that the big airport battle at the heart of Captain America: Civil War paled in comparison to the epic throwdown that was its comic book analog (seen above).

Yes, it’s a little intellectually dishonest to make that comparison, not least of all because to try and manage a cast that size in a feature film woudl be mayhem, and probably make for a crowded mess of incomprehensible CG.

There are also a variety of other reasons why not everything that played into Marvel’s Civil War comics could come through in the movie. If you outed Peter Parker as Spider-Man before he got his own first film in the reboot, it would raise all kinds of red flags. Putting that genie back in the bottle would be nearly impossible, since making a deal with the devil wouldn’t really play and any simpler approach to doing so would likely feel forced and weak.

And, yeah, even beyond rights issues, you have the fact that exploring the reactions of the X-Men — a group who had been resisting “registration acts” for years in their own comics — is a big part of what gave the largely-undefined SHRA some emotional punch.

And, yeah…some of the stuff that Team Tony did in the comics would have forever broken him as a movie character. Without years of cheering for the guy behind you, it’s hard to imagine that rendition to the Negative Zone or creating a clone of Thor to kill your friends wouldn’t lose most of the audience.

So…yeah. You can make a movie based on Civil War, the same way you can make a 70-minute movie based on The New Frontier. And in either case, you can come away with something pretty entertaining that covers a lot of the same visual and thematic ground. But it’s not actually that thing.

IDENTITY CRISIS

This is another one that leans heavily on the stories of characters most people aren’t super familiar with…but that’s not really why it’s a problem. 

Adapting Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales’s Identity Crisis outside of comics would be incredibly difficult because at its heart, it’s about these decades-long relationships and the way that both reality and perception changes around them over the course of a lifetime. It’s almost a metatextual rumination on the audience’s relationship to the DC Universe (more on that soon, we promise), but even if you remove that element, there’s the fact that built into this story is the notion that decades ago, there were dozens of superheroes, and at least two major teams.

That’s pretty much a non-starter, at least in a big, live-action movie. It’s possible this could do pretty well as one of those DC animated features in the vein of The Killing Joke or Flashpoint, if the script was alright.

THE AGE OF APOCALYPSE

Yes, we’ve seen that alternate timelines can be done in TV (on The Flash) and even on film (in X-Men: Days of Future Past). So what makes Age of Apocalypse so different?

Like DC’s Flashpoint, Marvel’s Age of Apocalypse really only works if you have a working knowledge of enough of the characters that the changes it introduces are meaningful to you.

Yes, you could have a movie where the basic concept is “it’s a terrible alternate timeline where a bad guy is in charge!” But it would be Age of Apocalypse in name only if you didn’t try to hit at least a handful of the major plot threads in this sprawling opus.

Maybe it’s something they can try to do a version of on Legion, since that character was so important to the concept…?

DOCTOR 13: ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY

Deadpool showed us that it can be a lot of fun to wink and nod at the camera, and that lesser-known (to the mainstream public) superheroes can work if done right.

And both Deadpool and Watchmen have demonstrated that, at least to some extent, there’s room int he cinematic discussion for a long look at the tropes of superhero fiction.

But Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality, in spite of being one of the best stand-alone stories from Marvel or DC in the last ten years or so, would be utterly impossible to translate outside of comics.

Basically, an army of characters nobody cares about or remembers are brought out of comic book limbo to fight thinly-veiled versions of DC’s best-known writers and editors, so that ultimately one or two of them might become popular enough to make their way back to the DCU proper.

…yeah. YOU WANT TO READ THIS, but it would be an unmitigated disaster as a movie.

SPIDER-VERSE

This one is too bad, becuase it translated reasonably well (if very, very loosely) to the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon.

But, yeah. The idea of planting a number of additional Spider-themed heroes — some from alternate realities, and at least one who was also bitten by the same spider on the same day as Peter — works well in the comics because we know that in the long run, they’ll either do something cool with those characters or write them out.

In the movies, it just runs the risk of making Spider-Man seem ineffectual (“Why doesn’t Silk have to spend so much time learning the ropes? How bad is Peter at his job?”) or redundant (since there are so many). What makes him special?

You can see those complaints coming out with all the speedsters on The Flash, although in a TV series you have more time to explore things (and some of those speedsters will likely GET a learning curve storyline).

STARMAN

This one is kind of a parallel to the Civil War issue, but not so much about characters as about STORY.

There’s just too much, and it’s too good, and fans wouldn’t want to let any of it go. This show is emblematic of something we’ve all wanted to see done for so long, but when it comes right down to it, it would need to be on TV, not in the movies.

This is the same problem you get with a comic like Saga or even things like Transmetropolitan or Preacher: to a certain extent, these stories are too important to just carve a slice out and be like “That part’s pretty cool, right?” You need to have all three acts represented, and if they’re either too dense, too complex, or in the case of Saga simply not finished yet…well, it’s probably not best suited for movies. That’s why after numerous attempts to make a feature film, things like Preacher and Y: The Last Man started to head to TV.

And that would be the perfect home for Starman. If somebody could find a way to do it on HBO or Showtime, so that they could really dedicate the time and energy to building Jack’s world and laying out essentially each graphic novel as a season (give or take), it could be something spectacular.

As a movie? Even the first storyline is packed with too much to not be a crowded, incomprehensible mess.