Comic Book Movies: Expectations vs. Reality

Since this is the year of superhero and comic book based movies, it’s only fair that we’ve been talking about them quite a bit. I was going to take a break from doing so after Civil War‘s awesomeness, but I’ve barely had a chance to because another is on the horizon: X-Men Apocalypse.

As I talked about in my post at the beginning of the year, this is one of the movies I’m most looking forward to. I’m a little hesitant now because of some of the movies I’ve seen so far this year. Deadpool was awesome, but I wasn’t sure what to expect with it, so I was happy. Batman vs. Superman was the essence of mediocrity. And Captain America: Civil War blew my expectations out of the water and pleasantly surprised me with how fantastic it was.

Unfortunately for me while watching a trailer for Apocalypse today, I saw that the reviews coming in from people who have seen it have been very mediocre, to say the least. Currently on Rotten Tomatoes it’s at a middle of the road 50%. As far as action movies go, it could be far worse. What I’ve noticed is that the less than thrilled responses tend to come from the fact that people have very different expectations for comic book movies, and a lot  of different factors go into those expectations.

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What is Sacred for Comic Book Adaptations?

With the marked increase in movies and TV shows that are based off of comic books there is the equal increase of the outcry around how the comics are adapted for the screen. At the same time I feel like you will hear one person yelling about how an adaptation handled a certain character and then only a short while later someone will point out how this one comic run fits perfectly with this adaptation of the character. It’s just that there’s decades worth of comics to draw from.

Not the image I first saw like this on Facebook… the one I liked had different TV and movie jokers over time, and the comics that they looked like.

A prime example being the new Joker as portrayed by Jared Leto. When images were initially shown of the new Joker people got up in arms saying it was not really the Joker, but then others started showing that actually there are comics that fit with this new look for the Joker. Then the question is raised about what from comic books are sacred when considering an adaptation if there can be so many differences between the comics?

Now I have only been reading comics in the last few years really, but even so it is easy to find places where there are inconsistencies between stories. Now in comics this can be explained either through the use of alternate universes or from just continual reboots of the stories themselves. So what are the things that usually don’t change?

Poll: Favorite R-Rated Comic Book Movie

So, social media has been exploding all week after all the claims about Deadpool… about how it’s time that the comic-book-adaptation industry finally (finally!) made an R-rated movie.

Generally they were reaction posts, something about how great Deadpool was followed by the face of a character from one of the (many) other R-rated comic movies. And then, well, then I saw this.

And it’s the reminder that, oh yeah, there’s been a bunch of them. Some big-name. Some recently. Many cult classics. Not a lot you can call bad.

So I decided, it’s poll time! What’s your favorite R-rated comic movie? I’ll just stick with ones from this picture, though there’s more (like sequels)… okay, and adding a couple I’ve seen in individual memes like Blade which means that Marvel has even backed an R-rated movie before, and Dredd.

Happy Friday: X-Men Apocalypse First Official Trailer

As CompGeek Siblings, David and I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons together, especially X-Men. Personally I’ve been incredibly happy with the First Class movies (more so than I was with the first trilogy; as much as I love some of the actors, the second two movies fell a bit flat for me) and so I was really excited to see the first trailer for Apocalypse. The first two movies were fantastically done, and some of the new faces in this one have me super stoked (Sophie Turner as Jean Grey? Olivia Munn as Psylocke? Eeee!) I can’t wait for this to come out!

Thoughts? Are you as excited for this upcoming X-Men film?

 

Thor – Love Him or Hate Him?

I might be wrong about this, but ever since the first Thor movie came out I have felt that Thor is someone you either love, or do not really care for. I do not say hate because that is not what it is, there is just a detached non-caring about the character due to lack of interest versus a this-character-causes-me-to-rage-I-hate-it-so-much. The place I found this most recently was when Sourcefed Nerd did their review of Thor: the Dark World. Trisha Hershberger and Steve Zargoza are on opposite ends of the spectrum when reviewing the movie. They do a really good job of reviewing the movie without spoilers (which you can watch above) at the same time their eventually scoring comes off very differently.