10 Embarrassing Comic Book Movies That Ruined Beloved Characters

The main purpose of a comic book adaptation is to give beloved characters and plot lines the silver screen treatment in the hopes that they can not only be given a fresh creative direction, but that they can find a new audience who would never have experienced certain franchises or stories otherwise.

Most of the time, this can be achieved with critical and commercial acclaim, as 20+ MCU movies and highly commended performances can prove. Sometimes, however, this doesn't exactly go to plan, and certain aspects of characters end up lost in translation.

Be it through misguided casting, mishandled source material or plain old creative differences, the process of taking an adored comic book character and trying to adapt them for cinema is a difficult one, and isn't always met with praise by legions of adoring fans. Film-making is an expensive, time-consuming process, but even with that in mind, better consideration could have been taken by the respective creative teams to make sure the transition from comic book to movie was more straightforward.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace has a reputation of being, simply put, not that good. If Superman III (1983) is a simple misstep, then Superman IV is a disastrous pratfall that somehow seems to last for 93 minutes. The most bitter aspect of this whole experience is that it killed the Superman franchise for quite some time.

Now, I'm not saying that Christopher Reeves is a bad Superman; he isn't, and there are two Superman movies that back this up. The decline of Superman's cinematic popularity is not his fault; he's still flying around and wearing his underwear outside of his tights as usual, but it's everything around him that brings Superman down as well. With a laughable premise and villain, The Quest For Peace managed to destroy Superman faster than any chunk of Kryptonite ever could.

It would be 19 years before Superman came back to the silver screen in Superman Returns (2006) but then you could also argue that that movie never did much to help the situation either...