10 Awful Comic Book Characters That Don't Deserve A Movie Adaptation

8. Leather Boy

S&M has always been a tough sell for mainstream audiences. Even Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin failed to make the fetish bankable when he gave it the Hollywood treatment with his 1980 thriller Cruising. Critics panned the film and gay rights groups derided it for being homophobic. The weak box office performance that followed put the kibosh on S&M as mainstream entertainment for decades afterward, which means potential S&M profits have been untapped for decades. This leaves Disney primed to try to corner the S&M market with an obscure character from the Avengers' past. Now that Marvel has begun their second phase of Avengers films it's only logical that they will look to offshoots of the superhero group to bring to the big screen. One such group, The West Coast Avengers, has a character ready and waiting to bring S&M into multiplexes everywhere, Leather Boy. Leather Boy wound up on the West Coast Avengers after misreading a personal ad and showing up for superhero tryouts. After a brief stint on the team Leather Boy disappeared, resurfacing as a super-villain who squared off against his former teammates. Leather Boy wanted revenge for being rejected when he attempted to rejoin the Avengers. Before the superhero Big Bertha ended his reign of terror by sitting on him (because that happened), Leather Boy managed to murder two of his former teammates. This storyline treads dangerously close to the plot of Cruising, where a leather daddy serial killer stalks his victims in the underground S&M scene in New York. At the time, a gay rights group found that the film conflated the killer's homosexuality and fetishism with his psychotic behavior. So, if Marvel decides to adapt Leather Boy they could face the exact same outcry that greeted the release of Cruising. Common sense would dictate that Leather Boy is better left in the dustbin of history.