While DC might be remaking some of its most famous comic book movies in the coming months and years, the studio needs to steer clear of one iconic thriller from 2005. There are plenty of comic book movies that deserve a remake, since their first adaptation didn’t quite capture the appeal of the source material onscreen. As incredible as the TV spinoff Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn was, it is fair for fans of the source comic to want another feature film version of Spawn after 1997’s ambitious, but misguided live-action movie.
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However, there are also some cult classic gems that simply shouldn’t be touched, no matter how tempting it might seem. Director David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is one such movie, a peerless action thriller that fuses dark domestic drama with an incredibly tense story of mob violence and brutal reprisals. Starring Viggo Mortensen as the unassuming diner owner Tom, A History of Violence opens with an intense sequence where this seemingly ordinary small-town businessman swiftly kills a pair of robbers who try to assault a waitress.
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence Doesn’t Need A Remake
This unambiguously good deed soon unravels Tom’s idyllic life as news of his heroism spreads and shady figures from his hidden past realise Tom is a former associate of theirs. Based on the 1997 graphic novel of the same name from John Wagner and Vince Locke, the former of whom created Judge Dredd, A History of Violence was written by Josh Olson.
The movie was a modest box office success but a major hit with critics, who hailed it as one of Cronenberg’s best movies ever despite departing from his usual niche of body horror. As the calculating villain Richie Cusack, William Hurt was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, while Mortensen himself called the movie one of, if not the best, that he has appeared in throughout his multi-decade career.
The news that a V for Vendetta show is in the works for HBO proves that DC Studios has no qualms about remakes, something that was already evidenced by the 2019 re-imagining of Watchmen on HBO, only ten years after Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation. However, for a variety of reasons, A History of Violence should be left alone.
2005 Was An Incredible Year For Dark R-Rated Comicbook Movies
Cronenberg’s icy, unglamorous thriller plays into the darker side of small-town vigilante stories, subverting the crowd-pleasing tropes viewers have come to expect from the likes of Prime Video’s Reacher or the Walking Tall movies. It is tough to imagine a remake of A History of Violence deftly capturing the moral ambiguity at the heart of Tom’s character again.
More broadly, 2005 was a stacked year when it came to dark, R-rated comic book adaptations. It would be another decade before Deadpool and Logan made swearing superheroes a box office staple, but the iconic Frank Miller movie Sin City and the perennially underrated supernatural horror Constantine prove that A History of Violence wasn’t the only superb comic adaptation to arrive long before the MCU and DCEU made the genre a massive mainstream multiplex mainstay.
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Image Courtesy of Marvel
