8 Comic Book Characters Hollywood Will Never Understand

8. Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex Gotham City
DC Comics

Of all the comic book movies to have bombed in recent years, Jonah Hex makes the least sense.

The character, introduced in X by Y & Y, is effectively just the archetypal Western protagonist filled by Clint Eastwood in most of his films. Making a modern Western based on the comic, then, shouldn't have been so difficult - especially given the resurgence the genre has experienced in recent years.

2010's Jonah Hex, starring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox, was a complete disaster. It fumbled the character's source material, needlessly overcomplicated matters by giving him supernatural powers and boasted a cookie-cutter revenge story without any of the craft, scale or subtlety that's typified most Neo Westerns.

The worst part about it is that Warner Bros. haven't made so much as a peep regarding the prospect of another Hex film, proving that they don't particularly understand the character's appeal, even as their animated wing demonstrated the perfect template for how a Hex movie should be done, with Thomas Jane and Linda Hamilton at the helm.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.