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This started out as a reply to Dan’s article about this movie winning the “worst movie” awards, but it got a little long, so I decided to post it here for everyone to read.

From what I’ve heard from fellow comic book geeks (I didn’t see the movie), the only thing the Catwoman movie had in common with the comic book character was the name; there was pretty much nothing taken from the books at all.

In general, comic book adaptations are tricky, and most of them fail. In my opinion, it’s partially in spite of the large volume of stories already written for the character(s), and partially because of this. I will use two recognizable examples to illustrate my point: the Spider-man and X-men movies. These are good cases, since most people probably saw them or at least know about them, and both have been around since the early 60’s. With probably an average of 3-4 monthly books (maybe less overall for Spider-man, probably more for X) over the last 40 years, there is certainly a broad base of developed plotlines to draw from.

Firstly, in any discussion about comic book movies, there will always be the objections raised by the “hard-core” geek fans of the series regarding how the movie gets things “totally wrong”, such as Spider-man’s webs shooting from his wrists (as opposed to the mechanical devices he built for himself in the comics), or the fact that characters like Wolverine and Rouge were not a part of the X-Men team until much later, and endless other differences with every character in these movies (especially X-Men). I will (for the most part) steer clear of these, since it’s my opinion that (#1) there probably has to be some degree of restructuring to make it appeal to the much larger audiences that movies have to go after to be successful, and (#2) the movies can still be enjoyable even if they don’t perfectly adhere to the comics, or even completely change them (as in these example movies). What’s more, pretty much every comic book series that has been around that long (at least the “majors”: DC and Marvel) have already had their characters rewritten innumerable times by various creative teams, so all the comic geeks should already be used to that sort of thing. The current “Smallville” TV show is a good example of this as well (if you can get past the Dawson’s Creek-ishness), it’s a pretty good “reimagining” of the Superman story - better than the movies in my opinion.

OK, now back to my points: both Spider-man movies (I guess I’m still kind of a geek, since I know that it’s “Spider-man” not “Spiderman”) were much more successful than the X-Men movies. The reason behind this (I think) was that they didn’t try to cover every aspect of Spider-history, they didn’t seem to worry about getting the details of the characters exactly “right”, and they focused on making a decent story that appealed to a wider audience, that was loosely based on a few narrowly focused elements of the comic plotlines.

On the other hand, the first X-Men movie was an attempt to throw in elements from at least 10 different plotlines pulled from their years of comic history, and just ended up not being very impressive because they tried to do too much; so not only did they “get it all wrong”, their new version just wasn’t very interesting either. They did a little better the second time around, by more narrowly focusing on one general theme (still intermixing others, but not like the first one). It looks like they may get the 3rd one even better; the ending of the second movie is an obvious lead-in to one of the better X-Men plotlines, and hopefully they focus exclusively on that for #3.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Catwoman sucking didn’t have much to do with comics, other than negatively associating a name taken from a comic character with a bad movie.