10 Movies That WASTED Villains From Their Source Material

With reboots ever-present in today's cinematic landscape, as well as the unflinching public demand for big-screen superhero antics, a remarkable amount of films borrow their stories from comics, books, or even movies that have now passed their shelf-life.

For the most part, these movies boast impressive profits in spite of their blatant lack of originality. After all, we all flock to what we know, and nothing is more familiar than the heroes we grew up watching, reading about, or pretending to be.

And, as we all know, any hero is only as good as their villain - and there's no denying that the movie industry is brimming with mad scientists, war criminals and general psychopaths that steal the show in their respective titles.

While Hollywood has seemingly found a formula to make these adaptations work, there are times when these movies really drop the ball, and it's often the villains that get the soiled end of the stick.

Whether it can be attributed to poor casting, poor writing, or all-round baffling decisions on the best way to translate the villain in question to the screen, here are 10 times that movies wasted villains from their source material.

There are seemingly endless lists of things wrong with the third entry in the perpetually disappointing X-Men franchise, but one of the biggest was its throwaway use and offensive over-simplification of the Dark Phoenix saga, possibly the X-Men's finest story arc in all of their long history.

We'd spent two movies watching Jean Grey slowly unlock the depths of her power, only to have her sacrifice herself at the end of X2.

When she reappeared in The Last Stand, it wasn't as the living embodiment of the comic entity that Phoenix was in the comics, but instead as her callous and homicidal alter-ego, also called Phoenix.

It felt like the cheapest possible way to throw in some semblance of the truly epic character arc, and it was barely recognisable as the story it deserved to be.

Add to that the fact that it essentially took a back seat to the other inspiration for the movie's story, the 'Gifted' story arc in which a mutant "cure" is developed, and it made for an insulting mess that did little but upset fans of the comics.