10 Comic Book Characters Who've Never Had A Decent Movie
Not so fantastic movies.
If it wasn’t for Christopher Nolan, Batman would still be fighting cartoonish nemeses who make bad puns while trapped inside a psychedelic discotheque. By grounding the character and giving him motivations that made sense, Nolan not only gave Batman his dignity back but also gave audiences a reason to care about the character.
The Dark Knight trilogy was nominated for nine Oscars, winning two, and proved that when comic book movies are elevated to their highest level, the results can be exhilarating. That’s not to say that Hollywood suddenly cracked the formula and never made another bad comic book movie, though, as anyone who saw The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen will tell you.
From the Adam West era to Batman Begins, it took nearly 40 years (and five disappointing films) for the Caped Crusader to finally get the movie he deserved. That’s in direct contrast to the Man of Steel, who hit the ground running in 1978 with Superman and hasn’t appeared in a decent movie since.
But enough about those guys, what about the other characters who’ve never been treated fairly on the big screen? Right this way.
10. Jonah Hex
Years before Warner Bros took their scissors to Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad they cut up and reshot portions of this DC Comics adaptation, which seems to start about a third of the way through the story.
Murdered by his commanding officer in the Civil War and resurrected by Indians, Jonah Hex acquires the ability to communicate with the dead and sets out for revenge on his former boss, who by the way has faked his death in a hotel fire.
That’s a lot of exposition to dump into the first five minutes of a movie.
One person with no love for the finished film is Josh Brolin, who claims that the production was so rocky that the financiers urged “going back and reshooting sixty-six pages in twelve days.” They also seem to have shoehorned Megan Fox (then white hot after two Transformers films) into as many scenes as possible, all to no avail - the movie made barely $11 million worldwide.