10 Comic Book Movies That Got MULTIPLE Characters Wrong
So who is to blame? The actor, the director, or the studio that's trying to sell toys?
Comic books are simultaneously the easiest and hardest stories to adapt to the big screen. On the one hand, they have intricate storylines, deep characters, are already laid out in storyboard format and come with a dedicated, built-in audience. On the other hand, that same audience can make or break the box office if their favorite characters are mishandled.
Producers and directors have to walk a fine line when drawing from this source material. What works on the page doesn't always translate to the screen. Being faithful to a comic doesn't guarantee success. David Harbour's Hellboy is a bit more comic-accurate, but Ron Perlman's Hellboy was more enjoyable. Zack Snyder's Watchmen has sequences directly lifted from the page, but still can't quite capture the feeling and tone of the comic.
Us comic book movie fans are lucky to live in an age where our inked heroes are jumping off the page. Avengers: Endgame is the highest grossing movie ever, Christopher Nolan gave us a definitive Batman trilogy, and there are so many exciting projects still to come. And, this is all without including some great work taking place on the small screen.
BUT... what about those movies that missed the mark? Had amazing characters to work with and still dropped the ball...? We're not talking about screwing up one character like Judge Dredd or Catwoman, but messing with everyone in the script...
10. Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Perhaps no set of comic book characters has suffered quite as much as the Fantastic Four. From the ultra-low budget 1994 movie (made only to retain the rights) to the 2015 Fant-4-stic failure, through four(!) movies no one has yet been able to nail down the characters.
Though each movie has varying degrees of success/failure with the four team members themselves, the villains and side characters have never been done correctly. This was never more apparent than in the 2007 sequel.
In Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer we have our returning heroes: a pre-Captain America Chris Evans as a fun Human Torch, Michael Chiklis doing the only real acting as The Thing, Jessica Alba as unconvincing as ever as Sue Storm, another forgettable turn from Ioan Gruffodd's Mr. Fantastic, and Julian McMahon returns as a terrible version of Dr. Doom. Though in hindsight, he comes off slightly better than Toby Kebbell's crash-test dummy.
The newcomers Silver Surfer and Galactus are handled the worst. The Surfer looks like slightly upgraded T-1000 and somehow comes with less personality. And as hard as it may be to translate the world-eater Galactus as an impossibly huge giant in purple armor, that still leaves no excuse for the way they handled the character and turned him into a cloud, worthy of a Sharknado sequel.