Comicbook Movies

Written by Chris Earl Tuesday, 14 June 2011

It's a Different Medium – You Idiot!

This month sees the Green Lantern Corps make their cinematic debut, unfortunately for fans however, this isn't the first time that a Green Lantern has featured in a movie. The comicbook movie didn't come into being when Hugh Jackman joined the X-Men, Michael Keaton suited up as Batman or even when the late Christopher Reeve went up, up and away as Superman. No, comics have been informing movie studios for decades and whilst their box-office draw over the past decade shouldn't be ignored, it's important to look at the past successes and mistakes to ensure that comicbook movies will continue to have a brightest day and not fade away into the blackest night.

Early Days

Movie Serials were the fore-runner of TV. These episodic adventures ran before movies on cinema screens (usually accompanied by the news reel) and often ended with a 'to be continued' cliff-hanger. Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel was the first superhero to get the movie serial treatment. Young Billy Batson could transform himself into Captain Marvel by shouting the magic word: SHAZAM! Many Brits will be more familiar with Nutty's Bananaman, who aped this classic superhero in the 1980s. Hot on his tail were of course Superman and Batman & Robin.

Between these early forays and 1979, television was the only place that one could see superheroes on the screen, bar Batman: The Movie, which spun out of the 1960's TV show to feature Adam West and Burt Ward on the big screen. In fact, there were so many TV and cartoon adaptations that they will have to be saved for another month.

Superman and Batman

1979 saw the first part of Richard Donner's Superman epic released. Originally one film, it was split into Superman I and II because of length. In my opinion, as good as both films are, they both suffer from the split. Donner's Superman hit all the right features. It displayed Superman being heroic, behaving like Superman and it stayed true to the lore that had been built up in the comics. The origin of Superman as shown in this movie has left a lasting legacy which many comicbook movies try to live up to.

Tim Burton's Batman took it's influence from the darkness in the comics of the time. The Joker had murdered Robin and crippled Batgirl; long gone were the goofy antics of Adam West's Batman. The thing that stands out about Batman is that it isn't an origin story. The movie is set early in his career, but he is already Batman as we start the movie. We discover more about his past later on, but we don't waste any time getting to what Batman does best. The Batman legacy is one of marketing. In 1989 EVERYTHING had the batsymbol on it, billboards, lunchboxes, pencil cases, hats, you name it. WB got it everywhere.

The legacy of these two movies often over-shadows all comicbook adaptations, with moviemakers trying too hard to copy what has gone before and not innovate their own solutions to translating the source material. Many defer to the Superman formula for telling, often relying on it too heavily. Spider-man does this, even down to what I call the 'rescuing a cat from a tree' montage. We also see studios try to over-expose us to the brand. This worked for Batman in 1989 because it hadn't been done to that scale before, but now there are so many franchises bombarding us with marketing that we get to the point where we barely notice the movie anymore. The "Got Milk?" campaign is a prime example of over-marketing; just what is being used to advertise what here?

1990s

After the huge success of the first feature, WB gave Tim Burton free-rein on Batman Returns, but when it hit a down note with many critics and movie-goers, they decided to steer the franchise in a different direction. Michael Keaton stepped down as Batman because he felt that the franchise should be going down a darker, not lighter, route. The downfall of the franchise came as Batman Forever and Batman & Robin took campy overtones from the 60s show.

Aside from Batman, the only big comicbook adaptations came from The Shadow, Dark Horse's The Mask, Barb Wire, Tank Girl, Mystery Men, Timecop and Image's Spawn. The genre was hardly battling for Oscar nominations.

Whilst technically a feature length TV pilot (which, unsurprisingly, didn't get picked up), I feel that I have to mention Justice League for three reasons;

1- it was released as a TV movie,

2- it features a Green Lantern,

3- it's awful and gives a demonstration in 'what not to do'.

Completely ignoring the shocking costumes, poor acting, misguided 'Real World' interviews and cheap effects, this adaptation falls down at the first hurdle. The characterisation is so poor that the characters don't even closely resemble their namesakes. Barry Allen (The Flash) is an unemployed jock rather than a careful forensic scientist. Green Lantern, Guy Gardner is Mr. Nineties rather than the arrogant ex-Football star that we know and love. It seems that the creators randomly attached superhero names to TV ensemble stereotypes. If the characters had resembled the source material, then a lot of the problems the script had would have been ironed out immediately (not all of them, it was awful).

In contrast, Marvel's Blade successfully took it's hero to an adult audience to make the most of it's hero's innate violent behaviour and hinted to studios that audiences were ready for comic heroes to make a come back.

2000-present

Bryan Singer's X-Men took cues from Batman and Superman by placing its heroes in a quasi-realistic settings and focusing on character over spectacle. X-Men paved the way for a slew of comicbook movies. Marvel followed up X-Men by launching out of the trap with Spider-man, Daredevil and Hulk. Perhaps their zeal to capitalise on the success of X-Men hampered the development of these adaptations, as only Spider-man and it's sequel came close to achieving their potential. Ang Lee's Hulk was successful in focusing on character, building up to the reveal of the Hulk and experimenting with comicbook panel split screens. It fell down, however, during the Hulk (rather than Bruce Banner) moments.

In 2005 and 2008 Chris Nolan redefined the standard of the superhero movie with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I think that the rise in quality of comicbook movies since The Dark Knight shows that everyone is taking the genre more seriously. It's only the media who bring the '60s camp back to haunt us, most of the general public have moved on. They want serious takes on these larger than life characters. To say that the noughties were the decade of the comicbook movie is an understatement. The general public have been introduced to, and embraced, Harvey Pekar, Scott Pilgrim, Hellboy, Sin City, V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Batman has pulled in over $1 billion for Warner Bros. We're now at the point where superheroes are a blockbuster draw, no matter how good or bad the film is.

Story structure: The real pitfall of crossing media

As I have mentioned before, story structure and characterisation are the real sticking point when it comes to adapting from one media to another. A video is considered to be feature-length when it lasts 75 minutes+ and most movies come in between an hour and a half and two hours. Comic books, however, can tell a story in 20 pages or 20 issues. The structure of the story is tied directly to the number of pages and where the adverts will lie. For a story that will last for several issues, we also need a 'cliff-hanger' at the end of each chapter. This results in a very rhythmic flow to the story. This provides a problem however in that there may be too many plot points or too few for a writer to be able to translate it directly into a screenplay; combined with the placing of the peaks and troughs in the action, this can also cause havoc with a movie's pacing.

A much larger problem occurs however when dealing with established characters. Readers of Hellboy know who he is and how he is likely to behave at the start of each comic because they've been reading for many years. A movie has to deliver exposition and introduce the characters in the first twenty minutes. A comic book can give a broad summary for new readers, but has the luxury or being able to ignore certain parts of a character's life if they aren't needed for this adventure. A movie probably has time to fit in three or four set-pieces of action and adventure at the most, whereas a comicbook has the flexibility to have more than one set piece in an issue or spread a set piece over several issues. In fact one of the staples of superhero comic books is that we have at least one set piece each issue, so we often get our characterisation and plot progression in a very visual, action driven way.
A comic can forget the main story and characterisation during certain parts of its arc in order to visit tangents or to plant seeds that set up forthcoming plots. However, every part of a movie should reveal more about the plot and characterisation without straying from the main story. In fact, when movies do stray to set up sequels, we can often see it straight away. Iron Man 2 is a prime example of this, as Tony Stark and Nick Fury sit down for a chat about SHEILD and the Avengers. These very different structures make it very difficult to get all the elements to work right. It might be a cinematic comic, but if you can't get the movie's structure right, it's not going to satisfy the fans or the general public.

Budget: A specific genre problem

Comic books have an unlimited special effects budget, whereas movies are very expensive to make and their budgets are very tightly controlled. This creates critical issues when it comes to scripting your superhero movie. Below is a page from an issue of JLA that shows off what a Green Lantern can do when he wills it. This page probably took the artist a day to draw. The same scene in a movie would cost millions in shooting footage to composite with effects, all for part of a set-piece that lasts for a few minutes. One of the biggest complaints that I hear about superhero movies is how they don't reflect what the character can do or show villains to their full potential. Sometimes it is because the filmmakers simply missed the mark and didn't do a good job (see Daredevil), other times it is because they are trying to stick too stringently to the superhero movie formula (see Superman Returns), but most of the time it is because the budget just isn't available to create what is on the page. Certainly, when X-Men was released in 2000, the confidence in superhero movies was next to zero. Singer had little choice but to do a more character driven piece with few action pieces, most of which are actually quite low on action. The movie benefited here as Singer wanted to do a character piece anyway and it is because he did so well with the characters that we started to see studios fronting more money for films like Spider-man, which really kicked off the genre in a big way. Whilst Batman had been made on big budgets, the fact that he is without super-powers naturally lends himself to keeping the costs down. Skulking in the shadows is relatively cheap, after all. Filming in digital HD and adding effects in post-production has become much cheaper in the past five years; one look at the low-budget version from the 1990s and it's plain to see that only now is a comic with as much scope as Green Lantern possible as a serious endeavour. As filming costs come down it's likely that we'll see more adventurous choices for adaptation, such as The Flash or Doctor Strange.

DC vs Marvel

Whilst there have been comicbook adaptations using source material from other publishers (Hellboy, American Splendor, Scott Pilgrim etc) since the rise to power of the comicbook movie, DC Comics and Marvel remain the two big boys battling for supremacy. Refreshingly, we have seen them take very different strategies in their releases.

After the dismal Catwoman in 2004, DC have rebooted Batman with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and Superman with Superman Returns. Watchmen hit big whilst Jonah Hex swung and missed. They have Green Lantern coming out this month, The Dark Knight Rises has begun filming and Superman reboot v3, Man of Steel is in pre-production. I don't think that the critical acclaim or financial gains that the new Batman series has produced need to be reiterated, but it's clear that DC are using Batman as their working model. Chris Nolan is even acting as Executive Producer for the Superman reboot and whatever happens with Batman once he has finished his trilogy. A sequel for Green Lantern is already being scripted. They are taking their time, learning from their mistakes and trying to get these characters right in movies that they have confidence in.

Marvel on the other hand seem to have adapted half of their universe to the big screen. Since 2002, we have seen Spider-man, X-Men, Daredevil, Elektra, Blade, Hulk, Fantastic Four (and Silver Surfer), Ghost Rider, The Punisher, Iron Man andThor. Captain America:The First Avenger is due shortly and next year The Avengers will assemble and Ant-Man has been rumoured for some time now. I think that it is fair to say that the quality of these movies has generally not been great, but in shear numbers they have dominated the comicbook movie genre. With Iron Man, Thor and Captain America being used to lead into the Avengers it's clear that Marvel want to build up a movie version of the shared universe that they have in the comics. This is a very tricky situation because if one movie bombs, then that will surely affect people's perception of The Avengers. Will people want to see a team movie featuring a character/actor that they hated? One thing is certain, they seem to be sticking more closely to the source material than previously before, without trying to do a direct adaptation of a storyline. That's one step in the right direction.

Marvel seem to be trying to maximise exposure to their characters through any means, whereas DC appear to want to present their characters in the best light. Which do you think is the best way? Would you rather see more comicbook heroes adapted to the screen regardless of quality or would you prefer to have a handful of really good movies?

Remember, every time you hear an argument against comicbook movies, take these catchphrases into your hearts and repeat: It was intended to be a movie, so of course the movie is better. It was intended to be a comic, so of course the comic is better.

Comments  

 

+2 #1 Mr Cheese 2011-06-17 16:14

Great article - totally agree regarding budgets. I still infinitely prefer seeing comics made into animated movies (which as far as I'm concerned are effectively the natural evolution of comics) as they are almost always massively superior to live-action films

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