Superhero movies have taken over Hollywood in a way no other genre has ever done. The films belonging to the genre routinely top the box office to the extent that prominent filmmakers have often warned that the popularity of superheroes is displacing any other type of film. Until recently, superhero stories were considered the domain of the silver screen due to the high budgets required to create them.
But thanks to advancements in technology and the new cash windfall being offered to streaming channels, television programming can now be created that rivals the movie production values of the biggest movies. In this new pop culture landscape where television offers the same storytelling opportunities as cinema, let’s take a look at some superhero movies that would have been better off as TV shows.
10 The new mutants
The X-Men movies under Fox Studios have seen some incredible highs and lows. Despite releasing several huge hits, Fox’s X-Men franchise was on its last legs towards the end of the 2010s. The last entry in the series was The new mutantswhich was supposed to be released in 2018, but was pushed back to 2020.
When it finally came out, the film turned out to be a damp squib rather than a triumphant final note. The new mutants was too small in budget and the scope of the story it was trying to tell to fit in with the rest of the X-Men movies. Still, the youthful main characters have potential, and the way the film ends, with the characters escaping their captors and heading off together to explore the larger world, would have made for an interesting TV pilot for a modern day movie. X-Men show with a young cast and horror story overtones.
9 Green Lantern
The 2011 Green Lantern movie is not very good. Just ask his protagonist Ryan Reynolds. But the failure of the film was not due to a lack of promising material. The Green Lantern comic book series have some of the deepest and most fascinating lore in the comic world, and the movie’s biggest flaw was to squeeze all that dense lore into a few minutes of exposition before moving on to an extremely by-the-numbers action movie plot.
A story like that of the Green Lantern Corps from the comics requires a lot of space to unpack, and a television series would be the perfect place for that. Even the creators of the Green Lantern film agree with this idea, which is why they are developing a television series reboot that the backstory of the Corps will expand well over several seasons.
8 Zack Snyder’s Justice League
Zack Snyder is probably the most divisive filmmaker working in the superhero genre today. But as polarizing as his films are, they have a passionate contingent of fans. So much so that those same fans managed to get the studio to make Snyder a four-hour director’s cut of Justice Leaguethe film the filmmaker had been working on before a family tragedy forced him to leave the project.
But the story doesn’t end there. Snyder has hinted he has a lot more to say Justice League movie, in the form of two equally sized sequels. All that story would be much more palatable to audiences as a TV series, what Zack Snyder’s Justice League almost become. A Snyderverse series would allow fans to continue exploring the filmmaker’s version of the movie Justice Leaguewithout diverting attention from the rebooted DCU currently being planned for the big screen by James Gunn.
7 Super awesome
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In the early 2010s, the superhero genre was dominated by PG-13, family-friendly movies. A bold new alternative to the trend was observed with the breakthrough success of Super awesome. Based on Mark Millar’s best-selling comic series, Super awesome was violently brutal and blasphemous, proving that superhero stories needn’t just be about squeaky clean characters who never make morally questionable choices.
Unfortunately, the Super awesome movies only scratched the surface of the dense comic book series they were based on. Fast forward a decade, and today the superhero TV genre has found worthy successors Super awesome in the Amazon Prime series The boys And Invincible. Given the popularity of those series, the time seems ripe for a TV reboot of Super awesome who could finally take a deep dive into the character’s lore from the comics.
6 The Incredible Hulk
People tend to think Iron Man as the beginning of the MCU, but it was actually beaten in 2008 The Incredible Hulk. The reason the movie is overlooked is because it was considered a failure due to poor reviews and box office struggles. The main issue is that the movie’s studio wanted to make it a traditional action movie.
But in truth The Incredible Hulk is much closer to the 1977 TV series about the character, where the focus was less on action and more on the protagonist going on a journey of self-discovery to try to master the monster lurking inside him. The Incredible Hulk would have worked much better as a slow-burning psychological thriller TV series, which would also have made much better use of protagonist Edward Norton’s dramatic skills rather than turning him into a typical action hero.
5 Daredevil
Before the MCU became a thing, Marvel Comics found patchy rendering on the big screen in fits and starts. A curious product of this trend was that of 2003 Daredevilwho tried to jump on the Spider-Man bandwagon with another street-level Marvel Comics superhero.
Unfortunately, the movie could never decide whether to be a gritty psychological drama about a blind lawyer or an action-packed adventure movie about a blind superhero. Obviously, the movie would have worked much better as a TV series, a fact that lead actor Ben Affleck acknowledged at the time he praised Netflix’s Daredevil series for making much better use of the main character and his world.
4 Guardians
If Dune is the sci-fi book that is often declared too complicated to make into a movie, that of Alan Moore Guardians series has a similar status in the comic world. Guardians was a seminal treatise on superheroes in a realistic setting, and the series was often believed to be too complex thematically to be cast in a traditional film. Zack Snyder rose to that challenge with the 2009 live-action adaptation of Guardians.
For the most part, the movie closely follows the story of the comics down to almost exactly copying many comics panels. Still, as many fans had feared, the movie works primarily as an action movie, while losing the larger thematic subtext of the comics in regards to American exceptionalism, the nuclear arms race, and exploring the disturbed psychological conditioning that turns ordinary people into superheroes . Given the critical acclaim of HBO Guardians spinoff series, the time seems ripe for a true TV adaptation of the original Guardians comics.
3 Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness
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disney
There are two major problems with Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness. As Benedict Cumberbatch pointed out, his lead character of Doctor Stephen Strange feels like a sidekick in his own movie. While Elizabeth Olsen pointed it out that her main villain Wanda Maximoff’s personal storyline to get angry makes no sense when she gets out of her Disney+ show WandaVision.
The solution to both problems is simple. The movie would have worked much better than the second season of WandaVision with Doctor Strange in a guest role. The extra hours of screen time would have allowed Wanda to actually progress through a proper character arc as she gradually becomes corrupted by the book of sorcery, the Darkhold, and turns evil in a quest to reclaim the family she lost at the end. lost from the first. season of WandaVision. This would also have allowed Doctor Strange to leave the show at the end of the season and move on to a solo adventure in his own movie.
2 The Unbreakable Trilogy
M. Night Shyamalan may seem like an odd choice to direct a superhero movie. But the filmmaker has actually made an entire trilogy in the genre. Starting with unbreakable in 2000, and then with Divide in 2017 and Glass in 2019. In the vein of Shyamalan’s other films, the Unbreakable trilogy is a grounded, realistic take on superhero stories that favors smaller character moments over big, flashy action spectacle.
Given the trilogy’s nature as a slow-paced superhero drama rather than a routine action-adventure saga, it would have made much more sense to make each movie in the trilogy a separate season of a TV series. This would also have given Shyamalan the option to continue the story afterwards Glassas the end of the movie hints at a larger plot yet to be investigated involving a secret government conspiracy to suppress the rise of superheroes and supervillains.
1 The batter
Matt Reeves’ bold new take on the Caped Crusader with 2022s The batter was praised by fans and critics alike for its grounded take on the superhero as a young and inexperienced vigilante. At 176 minutes, the film is quite long by normal standards, and even that amount of running time isn’t enough to properly explore the world of Gotham as Reeves envisioned it. the film already got spin-offs before its theatrical release.
Plans have been in existence for decades to create one definitive live action Batman tv program. The batter could have been that show, combining a high-budget cinema feel under the expert direction of Reeves with extended running time over several seasons to properly explore a young Bruce Wayne’s journey in his early years as Batman as he fights the many classic villains from the comics whose presence has been plagued by The batter.