5 comic adaptations that bucked the mold, and still failed.

Actor Tom Hiddleston wrote an eloquent essay yesterday for The Guardian basically praising and defending the sub-genre known as the superhero picture.  Plenty of disdain for the genre comes from the very notion that it's big-budget entertainment based on literature that was technically intended for children that gobbles up production dollars and screen space that otherwise might be allotted for more explicitly grown-up fare.  But at least some of the alleged weariness of this specific type of film (the superhero comic book adaptation) comes from a feeling that all-too many of them are basically telling the same story.  You've generally got the standard origin story which (let's be honest) basically takes Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie and pours it into a different color bottle (I say that as a big fan of Spider-Man and Captain America).  Then you have the sequels, which are quite often merely a case of escalation and/or the hero dealing with self-doubt often while in combat with a 'bigger/badder' version of himself (again, thank you Superman II) or a multiple villains who represent that which he might become if corrupted (Batman Returns).  But over the last twenty years or so, there have been a handful of high-profile comic book films that have attempted to play around with the formula but have artistically failed anyway.  As a rebuttal to the idea that 'all superhero movies are the same' as well as a reaffirmation of the idea that 'it's not what it's about, but how it's about it', let's take a look at five comic book adaptations that didn't play it safe, but didn't come out on top either.

First Looks: From X-Men to Green Lantern, ten years of comic book-film trailers.

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the modern comic book movie revival kicked off with X-Men and (kinda-sorta) Unbreakable. With the lukewarm response to the trailers to Thor and Green Lantern, and the Nolan Batman franchise wrapping up, we may just be on the tail-end of this particular run. For the sake of my own amusement, let us take a quick trip down memory lane with the most memorable trailers in the current comic book explosion. After all, in many ways, getting that first glimpse was often more exciting than seeing the actual film. For the record, this list will only include originals; no sequels (with one exception that I'll point out). And away we go...