Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, deadpool, entertainment, fantastic four, film, fox, marvel, Warner Bros

The Lesson Hollywood Should Take Away From Deadpool And Fantastic Four

The odds are that producers and executives in Hollywood are running around with three thoughts in their heads: people want R-rated superhero movies, comedy works better than dark-and-gritty and the Fantastic Four will never be a successful property. And if that's the case then we are all in for a series of bad superhero movies.

The reason that Deadpool worked is the exact same reason why the Fantastic Four didn't. It's all about respecting the source material and… to borrow a sports analogy… you dance with who brought you. How often have we seen in the NFL a top-rated quarterback coming out of college who gets to the pros and suffers because they spend all their time trying to teach him to be a different kind of quarterback. But you look at the Super Bowl, yes Cam Newton had a bad day but he won 17 games that season because his coaches let him be him.

And that is exactly what Fox did with Deadpool. They were afraid of the character, but put it in the hands of people who not only love the character but respected the source material. Years upon years of existing stories worked out any kinks and made Wade Wilson one of the most loved character created since the late 80s. And to do his type of story justice, it needed to be an R-rated film. But Fox didn't go into it knowing it would work, if anything I think they were certain it wouldn't so they gave it a small budget.

But Fox also made the Fantastic Four and if you want to know why this movie failed… buy the Blu-ray and watch the making-of featurettes. Everyone talks about the mood that Josh Trank was trying to create. The characters were all motivated by pain or guilt. And everything else from the costumes to the color palettes were informed by that motivation. We all saw the train wreck coming when Kate Mara said in an interview that Trank told her not to read the comics. Readers and fans of the Fantastic Four know that the book is at its best when it's a science fiction story and about family. You can have humor, but it should be about the humor and you can have angst but it should be about the angst. But if you ignore the source material then you have no idea what made the book successful in the first place.

The biggest knock against the Man of Steel was it didn't feel like a Superman movie. It wasn't about hope and doing the right thing no matter the sacrifice. Now this is something that can be fixed if that is who Superman is at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. If it's a two-part journey of him becoming the hero we know and love then Zack Snyder is somewhat redeemed. But if Warner Bros and Snyder went dark and gritty just because it worked for Batman Begins then they are making the same mistake Fox and Trank made.

You can look at failed movie after failed movie and see the disrespect for the source material. Years and years of writers and artist creating new stories for these characters shouldn't be ignored, they should be a lesson. The writers of the Green Lantern movie needed only to read a few comic to know that Hal Jordan was never a quitter or a whiner. Reading any of the old Green Hornet stories would have told executives that Seth Rogen's idea was never going to work. If a comic book character has been around long enough to consider making a movie / franchise out of them then you have to accept the idea that the creative teams who have worked on that same character have already successfully found what makes the character work… follow there lead or go make your own character.

So where I think Deadpool had to be R-rated and the idea of a PG-13 version is ridiculous, all the talk about an R-rated Wolverine film and an R-rate cut of Batman v Superman is just Hollywood getting the wrong message. You want to make an R-rated film, grab a character that fits in that mode like Lobo, ShadowHawk, Punisher, or a plethora of other characters. Wolverine and Batman can be violent but they don't need to be R-rated to tell a compelling story. And if you are trying to make an R-rated Superman movie then you need to get out of the film industry all together.

The real lesson that Hollywood has to learn is that comic creators are storytellers just as are screenwriters and movie directors. The medium may be different, but what makes a character compelling and successful is the same regardless of how it's presented. The CW didn't try to copy the success of Arrow by making a Flash that is dark and brooding, they looked at what made him a success in the comics and put that on the screen.

Comic books and superheroes are not a genre any more than police are. When you can have films like Police Academy, Training Day and Die Hard all succeed, it's because they were treated as individual films and not a cookie cutter genre. Just because your lead character is a superhero it doesn't mean that what worked for one will work for the next. The lesson Hollywood should be taking away from all of this…. When you go to adapt a comic book property, remember to adapt the actual property.

You know, like what Marvel Studios has done consistently.

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