Quote:
Originally Posted by speede5
These are comic book movies and a lot of those books were pretty damn cheesy. I wonder if it's a bit of an age thing, comics have changed a lot since the 70s / 80s and it shows in the movies, and which are considered bad/good. Anything fairly innocent and comicy(?) is generally considered bad, and anything gritty and 'real' is considered good.
I like the grittier movies a ton, but I tend to cut the cheesier ones a bit of slack as they are more akin to the books I grew up reading.
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I don't know. I've read through all of Claremonts X-men once maybe every 5-6 years. While there's a lot of goofiness and the visual style is pretty colourful, I think the stories are actually grittier than what would ever fly in superhero movies aimed for mass audiences. Admittedly, a lot of what happens is later written over for the sake of needing to go on, but many of the characters are pretty severely traumatized (at least at one time or another) by all the crap that's happened to them. And the good guys don't always win, especially in X-men.
I mean the Dark Phoenix story ends (although the exact ending point could be debatable) with the X-men fighting a challenge fight for the life of Jean Grey and flat out losing, driving Jean to suicide in front of Cyclops. (And not a pretty body left behind, she's burned to ashes, iirc.) Something like that would never fly in a film that's supposed to have mass audience appeal.
The comic books were directed to a much more devoted audience and a the writers had much more creative control partly because of that. A couple of unpopular stories would not kill the whole series. This is not how it works with the movies. Even the Batman movies are a much prettified version of the really nasty comic book stories. Also, the movies need to be PG13, which limits a lot of what can be done. Most of the best Batman comics generally considered the best are way more gritty and dark than anything in the movies.