Loyal Menhert has a message for Hollywood:
I didn’t ask for a Catwoman film. How do you even market a Catwoman film? Let’s imagine for the moment the greatest director ever worked on it, it’s still just a Catwoman film. You know what makes for a great Catwoman film? Batman! Marvel has plans to mine many 2nd and 3rd tier comics like Antman and Man-Thing for future films. How about just burning the money instead. Stick with the well-known characters. Or better yet, try some originality and create your own (The Incredibles and The Specials come to mind).
He has four other such lessons at the link. Mister Film Executive, you should listen to him as much as you listen to Steven Grant.
(Loyal link via Tom Spurgeon.)
May 18th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Ug, no. “The Specials”, Hayden Church’s ORIGINAL foray into super-hero movies, was downright lousy.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Yeah, that c-note character BLADE lost all sorts of money didn’t it?
May 18th, 2007 at 10:38 am
He totally missed the point of the Catwoman movie. It didn’t fail because the character couldn’t carry a movie, it failed because it was a bad movie.
The Tick was vastly less know than Catwoman before it was turned into a great cartoon series. Blade wasn’t any more popular or sucessful than Ant-Man in the comics, but that franchise did great. A great story can make a less know character do well, and a terrible story can sink a big, popular character.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Wasnt The Incredibles just a Fantastic Four copy?
May 18th, 2007 at 11:16 am
And way to conflate “comic book movie” with “superhero movie”.
KG
May 18th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Incredible was more than a FF rip-off.
Sure they have the same powers but a comic book superhero movie isnt just about powers. We read CBs for the story and The Incredibles had a terific story.
Batman is a great character but the movie Batman & Robin was so horrible that it almost killed a franchise.
And IMO Superman Returns had a weak story as well but a great character.
Story not source is important.
May 18th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I think Steven Grant has a good point in that second link. What works in Hollywood is the same thing that works in the comics market: a strong creative vision and passion for the work. That’s why Frank Miller’s stuff translates so well to the screen – he really, really loves and believes in his stories and characters, and that passion just leaps out and grabs you, transporting you into his crazy world for the duration of the story. And he’s been lucky in that the directors who’ve adapted his movies shared that vision and passion too.
I think that’s the main reason Alan Moore properties almost never translate into movies as sucessfully as Frank Miller’s, the people who do them are never on the same wavelength as the man who wrote the stories in the first place. Maybe that’s because Moore’s ideas aren’t as inherently visual as Miller’s, which makes them harder to express in a visual medium like film.
May 18th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Or maybe it’s just that they attempt to adapt Moore’s stories, but never attempt to bring the visual aspects of those comics to the screen in the same way Miller’s vision has been replicated. For instance, the people who did the movie version of “From Hell” kept some of Moore’s story, but there was no attempt to bring Eddie Campbell’s scratchy, dystopian version of London to life. Or with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, besides just butchering the story (which was bad enough), they left Kevin O’ Neill’s hyperkinetic visuals behind.
It’s like they buy the rights to these properties, then stripmine out the stuff that can be most easily adapted and dump the rest. But Frank Miller’s movies show how successful a complete adaptation of a comic to the screen can be when you make the effort to bring the whole creative vision to life.