7 Great Movies You Forgot Were Based on Comic Books

Hollywood’s multi-decade obsession with superheroes can make it easy to forget that not all comic book movies are of the capes and tights variety. If you’re anything like us, chances are you’ve had your mind blown finding out that one or more of your favorite movies were actually based on a graphic novel. We’re not talking superhero adjacent movies like The Crow, either. Maybe your secret comic book movie was a gritty crime drama or an existential indie comedy. The point is, plenty of films other than Avengers: Endgame and The Dark Knight have sprung from the four-color page.

We’ve compiled a list of eclectic movies spanning multiple genres that will have you jumping up and yelling at your screen, “That was based on a comic book?” Movies that — with one exception — feature nary a costumed vigilante in sight. Here are our picks for seven great movies you forgot were based on comic books.

1) Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer (2013) — the Chris Evans-led post-apocalyptic climate disaster thriller — was originally based on a French graphic novel titled Le Transperceneige. The Snowpiercer comic is actually a four-volume series with very little in common with its film adaptation other than the train setting and the post-apocalyptic ice-age backdrop. That’s largely due to director Bong Joon Ho wanting to craft “a completely new story and new characters” in hopes of creating what he called a “new dynamic Snowpiercer,” filled with “cinematic exhilaration.”

If you’re curious to see just how different the original Le Transperceneige is compared to the film, all four Snowpiercer volumes have been translated into English by publisher Titan Comics.

2) Ghost World

When most people think of the words “comic book movie,” they don’t picture a low-budget indie comedy about two teenage girls recently out of high school, but that’s exactly what Ghost World is. Based on a serialized story originally taken from Daniel Clowes’s indie comic Eightball, Ghost World follows Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (a pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe Scarlett Johansson) as they walk around their generic suburban hellscape, making fun of anything that doesn’t live up to their twisted standards.

Ghost World, the film, follows the comic pretty faithfully while arranging what is essentially a series of vignettes into a more cohesive story. The one big difference is the film’s addition of Steve Buscemi’s Seymour, a character who never appears in the comic but is in many ways essential to the movie’s narrative.

3) Men in Black

Initially published by Aircel Comics, The Men in Black comic is much darker and more violent than the films it spawned. Instead of a clandestine group tasked with keeping Earth safe from alien threats, the Men in Black from the comics are exterminators hell-bent on eliminating not just aliens, but monsters and demons while hiding their existence from the world. Though the two-dimensional versions of Jay and Kay still carry a neuralyzer, they’re more likely to murder witnesses than erase their minds.

It’s no surprise then that when Hollywood decided to adapt the comic into 1997’s Men in Black starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, they wisely chose to lighten the tone, focus on aliens, and drop the “The” from the title.

4) Old Boy

Old Boy is almost the exact opposite of Men in Black, an adaptation significantly more messed up than its source material. If you’ve ever seen the Park Chan-wook action thriller, then you know that narratively, but there’s some stuff that even the movie’s most diehard fans find uncomfortable. The unorthodox family dynamic, so to speak, is absent from the 1996 manga Old Boy is based on, as well as Park’s wonderfully choreographed and explosively violent hallway fight scene. All in all, the manga is a much tamer affair, though still worth checking out on its own.

5) Road to Perdition

The most unbelievable thing about Road to Perdition isn’t that the gritty crime-thriller was born from the same medium as Streaky the Supercat, but that it managed to make America’s sweetheart, Tom Hanks, into a believable hit man. Hanks’s Michael Sullivan (O’ Sullivan in the original DC graphic novel) is a cold-blooded killer and pretty much the polar opposite of Forrest Gump. Yet, the actor totally pulls it off.

While the film follows the general premise of the comic, it drastically reduces the violence and focuses more on the father-son relationship at the heart of the story. According to director Sam Mendes, The Road to Perdition comic is “much more pulpy.”

6) Mystery Men

On the surface, Mystery Men might seem like it doesn’t belong on this list. We admit, a film about a colorful team of superheroes practically screams comic book, but there is a good reason most fans of the movie don’t know it’s an adaptation, and that’s because it isn’t based on a comic called “Mystery Men.” The movie that stars William H. Macey as a shovel-wielding vigilante and gave the world Smash Mouth’s “All Star” two years before Shrek was actually based on an independent comic titled “Flaming Carrot.”

If you think the characters in Mystery Men are bizarre, Flaming Carrot‘s title hero is so weird that he was cut out of his own movie. While the lovable blue-collar losers that make up the Mystery Men were just the right kind of quirky for Hollywood, a man with a flaming vegetable for a head and a battle cry of “Ut!” was just too out there for the cinema landscape of 1999. Come to think of it, he still might be.

7) Red

Of all the films on this list, Red is the only one that even we have trouble remembering was based on a comic. That’s because the Bruce Willis action comedy feels like a uniquely Hollywood creation. The movie features a team of ex-black-ops agents led by Willis and plays just like a lighter version of The Expendables. Red the comic, meanwhile, follows Willis’s Frank Moses on a one-man revenge mission. Gone are the one-liners and supporting characters played by Hollywood icons like John Malkovich and Dame Helen Mirren. In their wake is a much more serious tone and a Moses that is less a jovial ex-soldier and more of what he himself refers to as a “monster.”

While Red, the comic, is great for what it is, the movie is a much more accessible story and overall just more fun.

Are there any unorthodox comic book movies you think should have made the list? Let us know in the comments!

10 Great Comic Book Movies You Completely Forgot About