What Went Wrong: 13 Disastrous Comic Book Movies (And Why They Sucked)

9. Josh Brolin & The Reshoots - Jonah Hex

With a cast headed by Josh Brolin, Michael Fassbender and John Malkovich and a very cool source comic to work from, Jonah Hex should have made its way among the best modern Revisionist Westerns. The fact that you're probably barely stifling a laugh at that tells you exactly what you need to know.

The Cause

First off, Brolin was a problem for a purist adaptation, as he didn't like the original script's over-reliance on violence, profanity, nudity and general R-rated goodness (which Warner Bros had initially loved). As the studio wanted him, they cut all of that good stuff out and brought in Jimmy Hayward as director and writer. He'd previously made Horton Hears A Hoo, so we should have seen this all coming.

As if by magic, Hayward's first go proved unimpressive, so the studio ordered extensive reshoots across ten days, under the "consultancy" of I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence.

Brolin later revealed they attempted to shoot 66 pages of script in 12 days to shave the initial budget of $80m down, which was never going to work. In a press release designed to drum up interest for it ahead of release, he also - somewhat fatally - admitted that "we missed some things during additional shooting that we didn’t realize, because tonally, there’s no model for this…It was kind of like plowing out a completely new genre road, and saying, now we know what we have, how can we extrapolate on that?”

That's a hell of a way to kill hype for your film, but watching the remarkably short 81 minute movie, he's not wrong. It smacks of nobody knowing what the hell they were doing.

How Disastrous Was It?

The film made a paltry $10.9m at the box office and sits at 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, if you go in for that sort of rating system. Luckily, it didn't put Brolin off making comic book movies, though.