“We’ve got established characters, set action pieces, and an iconic plot. How can we best fuck this up?”
~Hollywood Producers
For the longest time, the entertainment industry didn’t know what to do with super hero movies. With the exception of 1978’s Superman and the Tim Burton Batman films, comic book movies tended to be either bad, box office bombs, or both. Sure you had a Spiderman 2 here and an “let’s forget there was a third X-Men movie” there, you couldn’t find many great representations of comic books on the big screen. It’s hard to remember those days now that Marvel has come along and made comic book movies that pretty much print their own currency while D.C. um, well, you know, they try hard and we love them for it.
We bring this up because comic books had to exist for a long time before anyone figured out how to translate them to the silver screen with any modicum of success. And that’s where we are now with video games.
Video games have been “things that exist” for only about forty or fifty years at this point, and we’re sad to report that America has yet to unlock how to make those games work as movies. It’s a little surprising, honestly—we have hundreds of popular video games that are basically movies that you play, yet we haven’t managed to turn that into compelling cinema.
Don’t believe us? Well fuck you, then. Wait, wait, sorry, that was maybe a bit defensive. But we’ll show you. Below we’ve listed every movie based off a comic book that’s been made in America, and listed them in reverse order of their critical score on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. And folks, it is…dire.
