10 Comic Book Movies Everyone Tried To Copy

The comic book genre has pumped out some of the greatest films of the past 20 years.

Thanks to these epic tales, underappreciated heroes like Rocket Raccoon and Peter Quill are now being mentioned in the same breath as Batman or Superman by moviegoers. It takes a lot of talent to bring these films to classic status, but other studios ended up just seeing the dollar signs.

Whether it be through a specific scene dissection or just the way the entire movie is structured, many lesser superhero movies have been piggybacking off of the ones that left an impression the first time around. From having the exact same character arc to the marketing behind the film, the originality in these movies gets a little old once you start seeing these same tropes again and again.

Even though some of these may seem like a cheap way to get fans back into the theater, it really stands as a testament to just how good the first iterations were to begin with. These films may have a lot of doppelgangers these days, but when it comes to having an emotional punch, it doesn't really get much better than the original. Here's just a small helping of comic book movies that inspired countless imitators.

Upon release, it seemed that everyone was losing their mind over Men in Black. After years of movies trying to get by on a bunch of haphazard CGI effects, here was a film with a unique concept that made the summer blockbuster feel exciting again. While the charisma of Will Smith is bound to make any movie more enjoyable (Suicide Squad notwithstanding), people have been cribbing from this movie like its an almighty piece of sci-fi.

Given the more lighthearted tone of the film, many studios ended up playing up the supernatural elements of their stories for comedic effect. While something like Hellboy already had a stellar premise, much of what we ended up getting felt like it was ripped straight out of the Men In Black playbook due to how comedic those films were.

Even ideas like RIPD showed Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges as carbon copies of the Agent K and J dynamic.

While many movie studios have some brilliant material to pull from, Men In Black has been used as the standard if you're not sure what to do with your comic book properties. These films are not necessarily bad on principle, but their royalty checks might owe some compensation to Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.