Mishandled Adaptations

In a world where both the MCU and DCEU exist we have been blessed with some excellent live action adaptations of our favorite characters. But nearly as frequently we have seen characters be completely misused and mishandled. Almost like those writing for these characters don’t even know who they are. Wikipedia is free and the literal least you could possibly do. However I am a firm believer that if you are going to write a comic book movie you need to read the most important storylines for the character or characters that you are handling and I will die screaming on this hill. I am sick of poorly handled comic book characters. So here we go the characters who were done the dirtiest in their live action adaptations.

This one is unfortunate because she had so much potential, Jean Grey - aka Dark Phoenix. Not only was she wildly misused in the original run of the X-Men movies but when she finally got her own movie it was aggressively terrible. The Dark Phoenix movie was bad for a lot of reasons but the core of it was that the writers clearly didn’t understand that the Dark Phoenix and the Phoenix Force are completely separate entities. They aren’t even a little bit the same and yet they were merged together chaotically with absolutely no forethought or common sense.

Now you know I wasn’t going to get through this article without mentioning Wanda Maximoff - aka Scarlet Witch. In her early MCU appearances it was very clear that she was going to join the list of characters that were completely nerfed, this wasn’t changed until Endgame and she took on Thanos and would have killed him if he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his own people. And then WandaVision came along and gave her an actual story with emotions and depth. A proper exploration of her powers and opened up her character finally be portrayed correctly. And then Multiverse of Madness happened and Sam Raimi and Michael Waldron destroyed her character. They reduced her to nothing more than a mother, and forced her to go through the same exact character arc we just watched in WandaVision…and then “killed” her. Now obviously we know as audience members that she isn’t really dead, however the act itself is a very specific, very sexist trope that comes to us from the comics and undoes all the beautiful work WandaVision did. In her return she must only be written by women from now on or I will personally riot at Marvel headquarters.

I think all MCU fans are going to agree with this one but yet another character that the MCU mishandled was Ultron. First of all, using him as a one off villain was never going to be okay. Ultron is a presence in the comics, and defeating him in a single movie was a wildly terrible decision. Now it would be very easy for them to correct that but considering that the MCU seems to be going more cosmic I don’t think we are going to see Ultron again for a very long time, if ever.

Another one that is kind of a no brainer is Bruce Banner - aka Hulk. When we talk about MCU characters that were nerfed he is for sure at the top of the list. He just always seemed pushed to the side with no real arc of his own. All of his character development seemed to happen off screen which is never a good decision. And the end of his arc in Endgame just felt really rushed. We should have seen him get to the Professor Hulk stage.

Now this one lights a fire in my soul because she was the first superhero I ever loved, Shayera Hol - aka Hawkgirl. Now the original Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons were perfect. She had an incredible character arc and really both shows centered around her existence and they were perfect. But then comes Legends of Tomorrow, and I was so excited to finally have my favorite hero in live action. And then Legends of Tomorrow was bad…and it wasn’t just her character and I’m sure it was mostly the script and not the actress but her dialogue was terrible, the delivery was very Disney Channel sitcom like and going with the Kendra version of her character and not Shayera was an immediate NO.

I will not be including Thor on this list because I like his MCU version and don’t consider him mishandled so suck on it. I am one who doesn’t think that the stories adapted ever need to be comic book accurate but I should be able to tell that it's the same character, and some of these are borderline unrecognizable. There is no excuse for billion dollar companies to not hire a few comic book nerds with the authority to slap some of these writers upside the head. Do better.