75 Comics That Are Being Made Into Films 256
brumgrunt writes "The comic book is the new spec script in Hollywood, if this list is anything to go by. Den Of Geek has uncovered 75 comics that are in the process of being turned into films, along with their estimated year of arrival. It's scary, brilliant and bizarre in roughly equal measure."
Missing from the list (Score:4, Interesting)
Bluntman and Chronic
Seriously, it's scary when Kevin Smith accurately describes something.
So many already done.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Off the top of my head: Witchblade was a failed series on TNT, Red Sonja, Buck Rogers, Sherlock Holmes?
Oh... wait... are these going to actually be good versions?
ETA's? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me or are those ETA's totally bogus? There is no way those times can possibly be... possible. We have things with film in can the estimated to arrive the same time as stuff that doesn't even have a script yet. What a bunch of crap.
Dave Sim once said. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Well, he was quoting somebody else, but he DID say it. . .
The point being. . , comics are comics and movies are another animal entirely.
For every comics movie I've seen, I can never help but thinking, "This would have been more satisfying as an episodic TV series." Perhaps it's because comics rely heavily on word balloons and movies are actually quite conservative when it comes to dialogue, most being really just short stories. Episodic television offers enough canvas to do a more satisfying job with stories which are by definition, written as a series of short episodes anyway. A lot of drama and necessary timing can be included with a TV series which must by necessity be cut when planning a film.
I re-read Watchmen a few months ago when I heard about the film project, and it struck me that it was a story which would have done very well as a 6 or 12 part TV series. Not sure how they're going to manage to pack all of that into a movie without it feeling rushed. I guess we'll see.
-FL
Rob Schrab please (Score:1, Interesting)
Some of those titles make me sudder in horror, either because the source material is awful (Last Blood), couldn't possibly be done justice in a 2 hour film (Watchmen) or has already been done about as well as it possibly could be (do we need another Akira? And with sprout-face in it? Ugh.)
However, some comics are just crying out for a film version, first to my mind being Rob Schrab's Scud: Disposible Assassin. It was designed more as a movie storyboard than a comic, and would be amazing on screen.
Also, I'd love to see Thrud on the big screen - if a screen big enough can be found, that is.
Finally, how about a film (or better yet, TV series) of Schlock Mercenary? That could be truly excellent.
Re:"In the Process?" (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not exceptionally historically accurate...
In other news: FOX News is not exceptionally biased toward the politically conservative.
To be clear: I would say that 300 is about as historically accurate as FOX News is "Fair and Balanced". That is to say: It's true, on occasion, but it's far outweighed by all the times it's not.
Sorry for offtopic.. (Score:5, Interesting)
..but since we are talking about films, I would like to see Tim Burton's version of Hobbit. I can't imagine it, but I know it would be fantastic.
(If you agree, please spread this meme. :-))
Re:good grief (Score:2, Interesting)
If you've ever heard the term Shazam, before, then you should no that it's origin was in a comic book known as Captain Marvel. For a time, Captain Marvel was more popular than Superman. His powers were granted to him by a wizard, and Shazam refers to the mythological characters who grant him his strength (Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury). Billy Batson, mild mannered newsie, becomes Captain Marvel when he speaks this word.
Unfortunately, the World's Mightiest Mortal was felled, not by the arch-villain Dr. Sivana, but by the labyrinth of copyright laws. One of the current absurdities visited on us by the laws is that the right to use the name "Captain Marvel" for a comic book is not owned by the company (D. C.) that owns the rights to Captain Marvel. Therefore, they can produce a comic, or a movie based on a comic, with Captain Marvel as a hero... but they can't call it Captain Marvel!
Hence, Shazam, Captain Marvel's magic word, is often used as the title of his comic book, even thought the character is named Captain Marvel.
We will not speak of Alan Moore's Miracle Man, based on the British Marvelman, who was what the British Captain Marvel became after he lost his war against copyright in the United States. For his magic word was "Kitoma!" which is just Atomik spelled backwords.
Re:"In the Process?" (Score:2, Interesting)
The movie 300 wasn't based on history, it needn't be historically accurate. It's a movie from a comic book called 300, by Frank Miller. This comic isn't a historical documentary either; it's a work of fiction to be read primarily for entertainment (imho).
The movie 300 is very faithful to the book it came from, and so is an accurate rendering of it.
In short the two questions at hand are:
What was the film portraying?
How well was the portrayal; how accurate was it to its' base material?
For 300, the film portrayed the comic book (not history), and did a good job of it. The Sin City film adaptation was also accurate in this respect; you can open the comic and see the panels shot on the screen. For FOX, you'd need to answer these same questions... what is it trying to show, and is it giving you an accurate rendition of that? Personally I prefer "journalists" and "reporters" to "news commentators", but you shouldn't listen to anyone without using the old critical thinking...
Re:Akira (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can get over Titanic, hes actually a damn good actor.
Years ago i heard he was going to be playing tony stark in iron man (that obviously didnt happen), and i thought that was a terrible idea.
Untill i saw The Aviator.
Re:to all the naysayers in this thread: (Score:3, Interesting)
"if someone wants to turn it into a movie, why do you feel like something has been stolen from you?"
There *is* a rare commodity here, though, that has been 'used up', and that's the position of "only existing movie adaptation of [work X]".
It's a bit like brand identity. The value of the work seems to work out to something like 'number of realisations of that work in all media forms divided by total quality of all realisations'.
In 1977, there was only one 'Star Wars' movie, and a bunch of Star Wars toys. The value of Star Wars was 'very cool thing'.
In 2008, there's so much Star Wars merchandise you can't breathe, but there's only a handful of excellent works: the first two movies, the Timothy Zahn book trilogy, a couple of games. The rest are mediocre at best and the official prequels are dire. If you picked up a random Star Wars product, the expected value is somewhere between 'possibly very good' and 'most likely really really really bad'. Same with Dune: one good book, increasingly wandering sequels, atrocious cash-ins.
It seems like something of value really *has* been lost by the creation of a bad product that 'dilutes' the value of a particular brand as a means of identifying 'stuff I'm likely to like'.
It might be just *information* - indexing or metadata, a way of minimising the entropy of a search - that's lost, but as all IT people should know, that's a real loss.