10 Movie Adaptations That Clearly Hated The Source Material

4. X-Men

There's a lot to love about the original X-Men movies. Without them, the superhero boom that we're currently enjoying probably wouldn't have happened, and they served to give us iconic big-screen versions of characters that many fans still think of as being impossible to recast.

But the early 2000s were a different time for the superhero genre. Back then, movie adaptations were still kind of embarrassed by their source material, and X-Men was no different. The first movie makes overt references to this insecurity, most infamously in Cyclops' "yellow spandex" line, but also covertly in the way it disregards key plot elements and character relationships from the comics.

It's clear director Bryan Singer found something to latch onto in the original books, but that wasn't the detailed lore and mythology. It got to the point where the books weren't even allowed on set, as the director wanted the cast to think of their roles as proper "three-dimensional characters".

Ouch.