Many of us know the feeling when there’s a movie announced that’s an adaptation of a novel or comic book movie that we know and love. And unfortunately there’s also many of us that know the heartbreak when that adaptation fails to live up to the potential of the source material. This list is about those movies that took a comic book and turned it into a mediocre movie, but it had the potential to be something great. Note, I am making this list based on the potential of the world and concepts that I can infer based on what’s presented in the movie, I have not read or am familiar with any of the original source comic books/graphic novels.

10. Whiteout 2009

This could have been something along the lines of a reverse 30 Days of Night where the concept is that there is a murder in Antarctica just days before the final flight out before six months of lockdown during the extreme Antarctic winter. Not only that, but the murderer was covered from head to toe in the same kind of heavy winter gear that anyone could have been wearing, making them impossible to identify. The elements are all there: an extreme environment, a ticking clock, a small, close-knit group with one potential killer among them, but the film fails to deliver on the intense paranoia of not being able to trust anyone. It also fails to highlight the extreme nature of existing in a place like Antarctica outside of a few brief scenes, and while the ending is an homage to the story of Captain Oates, if you’re not familiar with that story it just feels absurd and comes out of nowhere. And on top of that, the tension ends up being undercut by clumsy action scenes that fail to add to the tension.

9. The Spirit 2008

Three years after the success of Sin City, comic book writer Frank Miller decided that after getting co-director credit that he would be able to write and direct his own version of Sin City based on a classic Will Eisner comic book character the Spirit. But he doesn’t quite have the talent of Robert Rodriguez and the decision to go for a mostly desaturated look with the occasional pop of color rather than the stark black and white with the occasional pop of color felt like a pale imitation of Sin City. Plus the characters and plot were ludicrous without crossing all the way over into intentional comedy. The character itself could have worked its way into an interesting film, but this certainly wasn’t it.

8. Barb Wire 1996

The concept: take a hot actress from a popular show and give her the lead role in a remake of one of the greatest movies of all time. Unfortunately, that show was Baywatch and they decided to remake Casablanca with a dystopian sci-fi twist to it. They also couldn’t decide if they wanted to play the remake straight or turn it into a comedy. They also apparently didn’t know how to highlight the assets of their lead actress and ended up with a sexy action movie that wasn’t very sexy and didn’t have very good action. In the hands of a better writer and director, they could have actually done something interesting with it, but instead we got this.

7. The Kitchen 2019

Alongside Whiteout, this is the comic book movie that’s the most grounded in reality without any sci-fi or fantasy concepts to muck about with. Instead, this is seemingly a simple gangster story with a twist. When the husbands of three mob wives get sent to jail, in order to make ends meet the three women band together to take over their husbands’ criminal empire. While comedic actors often excel in dramatic roles, this movie wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a full on drama or comedy, so it fell somewhere in the middle with a dramedy. But dramedies are a very fine tightrope to walk to get the balance of drama and comedy correct and this movie didn’t handle that very well. All three of the main characters handled their roles well enough, but there was just something missing overall that made this fall short of being a memorable and unique take on a gangster film, but it’s a concept that could have worked in the right hands.

6. I, Frankenstein 2014

I happen to be a fan of the Underworld movies, at least the first couple which was based on a story co-written by Kevin Grevioux who also played Raze and also wrote the graphic novel that this movie was based on. Surprisingly he didn’t write the screenplay for this movie which is honestly a very similar concept to Underworld. The difference is that instead of Vampires vs Werewolves, it’s Angels aka Gargoyles vs Demons with Frankenstein’s monster Adam caught in the middle. Similar to Underworld, the fighting takes place in the modern day with Adam being more or less immortal and has adjusted to modern life, more or less. Unfortunately the mythology of the movie isn’t fully explained or explored and the fight scenes are inundated with so much CGI pyrotechnics that it almost completely obscures what’s actually happening onscreen, especially as both the demons and gargoyles are so seemingly easy to defeat which creates an interesting visual in theory as you can see their soul either ascend to heaven or descend to hell depending on which one is dispatched, but with the sheer numbers in these fight scenes, the visuals get lost in the overall scale.

5. Virus 1999

The concept of this film had the potential to be a terrifying haunted house movie except on a giant tanker infested with an entity that uses various metal and organic parts to turn itself into a fearsome killing cybernetic organism. The main problem with this film is that it has a small cast so it’s not able to be a kill fest, but the director was more familiar with special effects than pacing so that the first two thirds of the movie ends up being boring rather than tense. But once the creatures come on screen, they look and move incredibly. But instead of being an intense creature feature gore fest, or even a thrilling haunted house style slow burn, it’s the worst parts of a creature film, survival thriller, and haunted house movie. Even Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Sutherland couldn’t help improve this failure of a movie.

4. Priest 2011

This movie has such a weird aesthetic mix of Western, sci-fi, horror, vampire, and action movie that it was almost doomed from the start. Once again, the world of this movie has a lot of interesting elements and opportunities for varied takes on the subject, but it decides to try and be much more of a mindless action movie with a slight mystery story behind it all. The vampires are presented as these mindless beasts that almost look like the troll from the Lord of the Rings, but the villain of the movie is somehow part vampire. There’s also this entire history that is glossed over about how these super powered vampire hunting priests came into existence in the first place, then became the outcasts of society once they were seemingly no longer needed, despite the fact that vampires do still exist in the world. There’s also a level of sci-fi technology despite the fact that society has apparently devolved back into the trappings of the old West. And with the movie clocking in at a sparse 87 minutes, there was absolutely no time to explore any of this extremely odd, yet potentially interesting world.

3. Monkeybone 2001

Another great concept of a movie about an animator who gets into a car crash and falls into a coma where his consciousness arrives in an alternate world that’s a cross between his animation and purgatory. He then has to work through his mental baggage to escape, and meanwhile his animated representation of his inner id escapes into his body to wreak havoc. This was directed by Henry Selick, the actual director of Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline among others. This has a very similar visual style to those two movies, but the tone is a lot more hit and miss with much of the film being a mix of live action, stop motion, animatronics, and even animation to create this visually intense world of Downtown. But the plot and characters are so bogged down by nonsense and underdeveloped personalities that the entire movie falls flat in the end.

2. Surrogates 2009

Surrogates had such an interesting concept. Similar to the Matrix, this is a complete world where the vast majority of people chose to exist in a pseudo virtual world, experiencing things via synthetic bodies that could look more beautiful, be stronger, immune to disease and injury, all while they are safe at home in their little VR station. But that comes with the cost of addiction as people no longer live without what are essentially virtual filters. It’s such a fascinating concept but instead of exploring how this world would create addictions and have people with false identities, it just creates a fairly generic action movie and all of the interesting issues that would pop up in this world are solved in a matter of minutes or aren’t actually problems at all. There are still some good elements like the uncanny valley-ness of the Surrogates themselves and there’s a chase sequence that runs over a large number of surrogate pedestrians who are damaged but otherwise unharmed. The mystery seems to hand everything to Bruce Willis’s character and they cop out with the ending where they had the opportunity to show some real life consequences for how the main character essentially destroyed the entire surrogate system, but they opted for a happier ending instead.

And that comes to the end of my list, are there any other comic book films that you think failed to live up to the potential that was the original comic or even just the original concept of the comic? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section, or do you think I highlighted a movie that was better than I described it as? Maybe even the concept was empty to begin with and was already destined for failure from the start. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.