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Adapting Comic Books to Movies

Henry Atkins
Dec 2, 2017
2 min read

Out of all the different variations of a Comic Book adaptation, Movies usually are the most controversial on the account of poor casting, poor writing and poor costume design.The 5 SpiderMan movies before 'SpiderMan Homecoming' are known for being bad for writing especially.

The Batman movies are also culprits for bad decisions such as costume design in 'Batman Forever', casting in 'Suicide Squad' (Yes, I know this isn't a Batman movie per say but it does include Batman and a few of the Batman villains) and writing in 'Batman and Robin'.(From this point on I'm mostly, if not only referring to the Batman movies since there are so many at this point).

These movies are a mixture of both new material and old material. 'SpiderMan' and 'The Amazing SpiderMan' both begin with the usual tragic origin story but then continues to throw in new stuff each time. 'SpiderMan' gave SpiderMan the ability to shoot webs from his wrists automatically while in 'The Amazing SpiderMan' the SpiderMan builds the wrist web launcher which is in fact the proper origin of that ability.

The same goes for the Batman movies. Sad backstory, blah, blah, blah, and then a Batman villain. If anyone heeded my suggestion from the 'Adapting Comic Books to TV' chapter then you would have seen the Film Theory video on YouTube which mentions the 3 ages of Comics. Not only do Cartoons and TV shows based off Comics apply to the same 3 ages of Comics but so do the Movies too.

Here's the video regardless:

While the early Batman Movies are more like your average Comic Book story with goofy and gimmicky villains and... Bat-Credit Cards...

Ahem...

the 'Dark Knight' Trilogy during this current millennium covers the more darker side of Comic Books.This will be plainly obvious to anyone who watched said video.

Oddly this fluctuation of theme didn't seem to rustle the fanbase based off their affinity to rip into anything that's not faithful to the original. Not just this fanbase. All fanbases. Then again the source material and its creators fluctuates the themes themselves too.