Missed Opportunities

Reviews are coming in for Warner Bros' Green Lantern, in theaters now, and many of them are quite unkind, to put it mildly. I'm trying to put them out of my mind as I intend to see it sometime during its release(though I'll definitely save money and avoid the 3-D screenings).

All of this vitriol, however, reminds me of all of the wasted opportunities in launching comic-book properties that were rushed to the screen after the first Spider-Man smashed box-office records at the time, being the first ever movie to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend.

People talk about the Hulk movies as wasted opportunities, and maybe they were, but if nothing else they can't be blamed for not trying. They got a white-hot director (Ang Lee, who at the time had just been nominated for an Oscar), a topnotch effects outfit (ILM, with no less than the legendary Dennis Muren overseeing the effects work), and a competent cast with the inspired casting choice of Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. It took Ang Lee and his team of screenwriters to screw everything up, rather than any of the Marvel execs, but even in the midst of the wreckage one can see the production value of this movie. There was an effort, albeit misguided, to make a compelling movie. The second movie tried, perhaps too hard, to distance itself from the first one in tone, running time, and overall production, but it was simply not enough. Still, the effort in both cases to make and sell good movies were there, and there are people who acknowledge that, so these are not completely wasted opportunities.

No, for me the true wasted opportunities to bring comic books/graphic novels to life are those in which either the production or promotion of the film was done so badly that one could reasonably argue that the studio did not really care whether the film was any good or, in at least one case, if the film actually succeeded. They are:

1. The Fantastic Four - the funny thing is, I can actually relate to the DC/Green Lantern fans trying to stem the tide of negative reviews over at rottentomatoes.com. At the time this movie came out I wanted to like it and succeeded in spite of all the negative reviews, in making myself like it, even though all it took was for me to see it again on cable to finally have the reality of what a trashy movie it was sink in. The Fantastic Four, whose members were dubbed "imaginauts" by one of the series' writers if not co-creator Stan Lee himself, had the potential to be bigger and more dazzling onscreen than any superhero movie to date, what with their star-spanning, dimension-jumping adventures, but Twentieth Century Fox, who outside of the first two and the most recent X-men movie has yet to make a decent comic-book-based film, saw none of that and instead made one of the most pedestrian movies ever to hit the screen. A pedestrian director, a limp script, mostly pedestrian actors, and a visual-effects house I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people) never even heard of pretty much ensured this film's painful mediocrity, and even though the sequel had slicker effects courtesy of WETA Digital and a slightly brisker pace, it was still saddled by many of the same issues. Fox itself has declared the series up for rebooting, what with the threat of Disney/Marvel recovering the property looming and all, and to be fair X-Men: First Class showed that they can make a decent comic-book based movie, but it was a shame that they weren't able or even willing to get this right the first time. At least Green Lantern fans can have the consolation of knowing that WB spent reportedly $300 million on bringing Hal Jordan to the big screen; Fox didn't even bother to pony up half of that, and the parsimony definitely shows.

2. Daredevil - this is a character whose personal pain and pathos could give easily give Batman a run for his money, and a Daredevil film done right could easily make Nolan's Bat movies look like kitsch. There are some people who even regard Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (particularly his Born Again storyline) more highly than his work on such landmark comics as The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, in 2003 Mark Steven Johnson made a film that was so bad it's mentioned in the same breath as Joel Schumacher's Batman movies rather than Christopher Nolan's. Again, this was a movie I wanted to like, but even a second viewing in the theaters was enough to burst my bubble and bring me back to the real world. I've heard talk about how much better the director's cut of this movie is, but I honestly won't bother to find out; that's how badly burned I felt by this movie.

3. Stardust - it was downright criminal what Paramount pictures did with this movie. The truth is that it was a truly solid, if not necessarily great movie. It was entertaining, it had a likable lead actor (Charlie Cox) and some memorable supporting turns from some pretty well-known Hollywood actors (Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), decent effects and a freaking Neil Gaiman story and had the potential to work, even as a modest box-office hit. Heaven only knows how many worse movies have gone on to greater success. Rather than even try to sell this film Paramount, more enamored with crap like Transformers and Shrek 3 dumped it in the late summer of 2007 and gave it a couple of trailers that can best be described as perfunctory, and which, quite frankly, didn't really capture the spirit of the film. The fact that Vaughn was able to get his next film, the self-financed Kick-Ass, to open at number one at the U.S. box-office despite having derived the film from a lesser-known comic book property and despite having no known actors in the lead roles (with Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy character being a supporting role) shows the power of marketing, very little of which was invested in this film. Now THIS is a wasted opportunity; another good movie that just fell under everyone's radar.

Now, granted, the FF and DD are getting reboots, but if there's anything the failure of both Hulk movies and of all three Punisher movies shows, if you get it wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that people will come back for seconds, even if it is better the next time around. The reason the Batman and James Bond reboots worked so well for their respective franchises was that these films were a return to form; they reminded audiences of the movies in the series that they liked in the first place. Therefore if the Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots fail to take off in the eyes of audiences, then those first half-assed efforts really will have been nothing more than wasted opportunities to introduce audiences to what could have been some truly compelling stories. If Green Lantern fails, it will be too.