Movies and Comics
I am not surprised to find out that the movie adaptation of the Losers did not do well this weekend. It came in at number four in its debut, according to Box Office Mojo. Now I was a fan of the comic but when I saw the tailer I thought the movie looked like junk and from the reviews I have read it looks like it was indeed a poor adaptation.
This is coming off the previous weekend where Kick Ass fell well below expectations. This lead to Rich Johnston wondering in a post if comics based movies are going to go into a downturn of sorts. I would assume meaning that Hollywood would loose interest in comics. I don’t believe that will happen and I’m sure Iron Man 2 will do very well and change that tune.
What I find most interesting in all this is the diversity of the comics being made into movies right now. The average person would not know or care that the Losers was a comic. It probably just looked a rip off to the A-Team to most. The upcoming Jonah Hex movie will just be seen as a western to the average person. Scott Pilgrim will just look like a quirky indy film and so on. While it is too bad many of these non super hero movies based on comics are not doing well, it is still a very welcome site to see them being made. To put it a better way, it is nice to have genre based diversity.
As for the Losers, book one of the collected version on Amazon is not that much more then a movie ticket. I recommend picking that up instead of seeing that movie or any junky movie for that matter. It’s just a good comic. On a trivia note for the longest time I was under the impression that the Losers was creator owned book like most in the Vertigo line but it’s actually a complete remake of a old DC war comic. So DC flat out own the Losers, which would explain why it was not under the Vertigo banner when it was originally coming out in the monthlies. It’s under the Vertigo banner now but that is likely to do with marketing, since someone who likes 100 Bullets, the Unknown Soldier, and so on would also like the Losers.
I saw The Losers earlier today. It’s not “junky.” It’s actually a lot of fun.
Well that’s a surprise as based on everything I have read it took out or changed most of the key things that made the comic so great to me. The big one being how Max in the movie is a straight up bad guy that you see from the start. In the comic you don’t see him until near the end of the run, so for most of the series he is a complete mystery. I always liked that.
DD, you’re the first person I know of who has said that movie was good. A friend of mine who is also a comics reader said it was even worse than the Wolf Man.
I didn’t say it was good, necessarily, but I wasn’t bored by it, it gave me a few laughs, and by the end of it, I left the theatre happy. Chris Evans is great, and the rest of it was just all around fun. I never read the comic, and I’ll never see the movie again, but it’s not as bad as everyone seems to think it is.
Here’s what Roger Ebert has to say about it:
“The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It’s fun.”