Marvel Comics Characters Hollywood Could Never Get Right
There's one thing you really have to say about the Marvel movies that we've gotten over the past decade: They do not shy away from throwing in the most obscure weirdos they can find. As much as we've all gotten used to Rocket Raccoon being one of Hollywood's most bankable characters, it's somehow even more surprising that our current crop of superhero movies includes characters like Exitar the Exterminator, the Collector, and Proxima Midnight. Heck, they put Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, in a major motion picture, and it was great.
Clearly, there's no limit to how deep they're willing to dig when it comes to putting comics on the big screen, but there are still a few that seem like they'd be pretty difficult for the movies to get right. From overly complicated backstories to missed opportunities to characters who are just plain weird, here are a few of the Marvel characters that Hollywood just probably couldn't get right.
Master Pandemonium
There are a lot of characters floating around the Marvel Universe that are meant to be at least a little humorous, and as weird as they might be, they tend to have a pretty easy time fitting into the films. The characters who were intended to be taken completely seriously and landed somewhere south of hilarious, however, are much more difficult to pull off.
Case in point: Master Pandemonium, a very serious villain whose arms are demons, or occasionally babies. His major role in comics involved kidnapping the infant twin sons that the Scarlet Witch had with her robot husband, the Vision, and turning them into his arms because having tiny boys for arms would allow him to ... accomplish ... something. It's not really clear what he wanted — something about how the two arm-babies were actually part of his soul that had been removed by the Devil in order to give him Satanic arm-demons? — but it's definitely clear that having babies instead of hands would be, at best, phenomenally inconvenient.
In more recent years, that inconvenience has become a defining part of Master P's character, to the point where he's been depicted as having a truly depressing life where his hands, which are demons, are constantly dunking on him because he sucks real bad. That's amazing when you have years of comic book history behind you, but getting a movie audience to react to "what if arm was baby and/or demon?" with anything other than absolute confusion and possibly disgust would challenge even the greatest filmmakers.
Marvel Zombies
Considering that they're two of the most popular types of genre films these days, you'd think that combining a zombie story with a superhero story would be the easiest possible concept to sell to an audience. In fact, it was — in 2006, Marvel Zombies brought horror fans and superhero fans together for a series that was pretty evenly split between over-the-top zombie gore and ridiculous slapstick comedy about superheroes eating each other. It was so successful that it wound up spawning a half-dozen sequels, including stories where the zombified "heroes" invaded the regular Marvel Universe and had to be fought off by Morbius the Living Vampire and Howard the Duck. Yeah!
That said, something that works in comics, with an audience that's used to alternate realities, mirror universes, and other endless interdimensional permutations that turn good guys into flesh-eating monsters, probably wouldn't work for a mainstream audience. As much as people like horror stories, there are very few people out there who actually want to see Tom Holland as Spider-Man devouring Marisa Tomei's Aunt May, complete with downright Sam Raimian levels of blood and gore dripping from his jaws. Even if they turn out to not be the "real" versions of the characters, that might come off as a little upsetting.
Galactus
There's no villain that deserves to be in a movie more than Galactus. The Devourer of Worlds was Marvel's first great cosmic villain, arriving in 1966 in a story that provided the blueprint for the world-shattering events that we're still getting with clockwork regularity today. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that he'll make the jump to the big screen again any time soon.
For a while, it seemed like the biggest obstacle for Galactus came from the visuals. He's pure four-color comic books, with a distinctive design by the iconic Marvel Universe co-creator Jack Kirby, and fits perfectly on the page. In a movie, however, selling audiences on the idea of a 100-foot-tall spaceman in purple armor with a giant tuning-fork helmet probably felt like a tall order, which explains why Big G's one and only film appearance in the fairly forgettable Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer depicted him as a very angry cloud. Now, however, we've seen a movie about a 7-foot purple spaceman using magic rocks to kill half the universe make $2 billion in a week, so it's pretty clear that audiences are a lot more forgiving than we used to think.
No, the problem now is that in a post-Thanos world, a guy who only eats one planet a time (and actually kind of feels bad about it) just doesn't seem like a big deal. That's the problem with being the character who set the standard and laid down the foundation. He was just too cosmic for the first attempt, and now that he has a shot at another one, he's not cosmic enough.
Stegron the Dinosaur Man
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has expanded to include some pretty bizarre stuff, but most of the weirder sections have been, well, pretty far from home. You've got Knowhere (the space station built around the remains of a dead Celestial), the fallen civilizations of Titan, and the techno-magical golden city of Asgard. But on Earth, things are more or less the same as they are here in the real world. The only exception, of course, is the hyper-advanced nation of Wakanda and its supply of Vibranium, but other famous Marvel locations like Latveria or Monster Island are conspicuously absent.
Sadly, that means that the MCU as it stands does not feature the Savage Land, the hidden Antarctic jungle in which dinosaurs are still a pretty huge part of the local fauna. That's something that could change in pretty much any upcoming movie, but there are still a few steps from "dinosaurs are still alive hanging out at the South Pole" to "I am going to use dinosaur DNA to turn myself into a human stegosaurus, and then also try to turn everyone else into dinosaurs, too, while fighting Spider-Man."
Those are the steps that Dr. Vincent Stegron, a character who was doomed from birth by having a name that was perfect for a humanoid dinosaur supervillain, would have to take in order to exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All things considered, it's not that unlikely in a franchise that has built several emotional moments around a talking tree, but they'd probably want to give us a little time to get used to just having dinosaurs around before they started mutating scientists.
American Kaiju
Sometimes, it seems like the MCU is just throwing in characters to prove that they can do whatever they want and still wind up with a truly Scrooge McDuck-esque pile of money to roll around in once it hits theaters. Really, that's the only possible explanation for why somebody decided to throw a gigantic statue of Bi-Beast, an amazing Hulk villain who has two faces stacked one on top of the other, into a brief scene in Thor: Ragnarok. If they really want to push the boundaries, though, they need to stop going halfway and give us the most ridiculous character they can. They need to give us American Kaiju.
The concept here is brilliant in its simplicity: An army soldier named (wait for it) Todd Ziller volunteers for a military experiment to create ... well, an American kaiju. The result is a suspiciously Godzilla-esque giant monster with the stars 'n' stripes emblazoned on its torso, who roars "YUU! ESS! AYYY!" while stomping on our country's enemies. Also, it is heavily implied that before he was experimented on and turned into a Godzilla, Ziller was in fact "Marine Todd" from the meme about the soldier who punches out his atheist professor, which you might remember from your uncle posting it on Facebook and insisting that it really happened.
Could it happen? It's definitely conceivable — the MCU has had giant weird monsters in it since the Chitauri busted up Manhattan in The Avengers — but it seems unlikely. With the Falcon's promotion to the position of post-Endgame Captain America, it seems the job of a patriotic hero has been filled. Better luck next time, Todd.
Kraven the Hunter
At first glance, Sergei Kravinoff seems like an extremely simple addition to the Spider-Man movies. After all, with the impending debut of Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, he's the only member of the original Sinister Six who hasn't been on the big screen in some form, and the idea of a hunter who chooses to pursue the most dangerous game — a teenager who can throw cars — is a pretty easy one for audiences to get behind.
The problem, however, would be getting him right, and if "getting him right" means staying faithful to the comics, then there are more than a few obstacles in the MCU's path. For one thing, his classic costume, which consists of various animal prints arranged into things like skin-tight leopard-print capris, a spiked zebra belt, and a crop top vest (with no shirt underneath) that appears to be made entirely from a lion's face? It might look a little silly translated into live-action. At the other end of the scale, if you're planning on taking cues from his most famous story, Kraven's Last Hunt, that would involve the character hanging out naked, submerging himself in and then eating a room full of spiders, and then killing himself. Threading the needle between a little too goofy and way too dark would be pretty difficult.
Plus, any adaptation that did not include his canonical transportation, the Kra-Van, would most definitely be an insult to the fans.
Kaine
It's not actually that unlikely that the MCU will eventually touch on the idea of a clone of Peter Parker. As confusing and ultimately off-putting as the infamous "Clone Saga" was in the comics, it's still a pretty prominent part of the Spidey mythology, and if nothing else, they've already seeded a potential appearance by the Jackal in the movies. That's not a joke — Peter's science teacher at Midtown High in Homecoming is credited as "Ms. Warren" and played by Orange Is the New Black's Selenis Leyva, who seems like pretty big actress for what turned out to be about 30 seconds of screentime.
Point being, there's a decent chance that we might get a Spider-Clone running around the MCU at some point, and we might even hear the name "Ben Reilly" spoken in a major motion picture. Even if all that happens, though, it still seems like a pretty big stretch to imagine that we'd also get around to the third Spider-Clone: Kaine.
Kaine, who had the long hair, weird costume, and teeth-gritting demeanor of a true '90s antihero, was a permanently pissed-off clone who used the power of his sticky spider-hands to burn people's faces off in what he called "The Mark of Kaine." That is, to say the least, a lot. If it's too far for the comics, it's definitely too far for the screen, but hey. At least Kaine can rest easy in the knowledge that as long as Spidercide exists, he's not the least likely clone to be featured in a movie.
Adam X, the X-Treme
They haven't had as much success with the deep cuts as their MCU cousins, but for all of their flaws, the past 20 years of X-Men films can never be accused of ignoring the more obscure parts of their version of the Marvel Universe, either. They've thrown in weird time-travel stories and given screen time to characters like Blink and Caliban, and that's before you get around to the Deadpool movies throwing in Negasonic Teenage Warhead and weirdos like Zeitgeist and Bedlam.
They have to draw the line somewhere, though, and it definitely feels like it would be drawn well before they got around to Adam X, the X-Treme. If you're not familiar with him, take a moment to imagine that the '90s were a dude. There, you've got it. That's Adam X, the answer to the question of what Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit would be like if he had superpowers.
How '90s is he? Well, his costume includes a backwards baseball cap, and his mutant power is that he can set your blood on fire, but only if you're already bleeding, so he carries swords and wears shoulder pads covered in knives. Also, at one time, he was suspected of being the Third Summers Brother (a long-lost sibling of Cyclops and Havok), but he was actually just an alien from an interstellar empire of bird-people. On the one hand, that is a whole lot of complicated stuff to fit into a movie, but on the other, he can set your blood on fire. Who doesn't want to see that on the big screen?
Elsa Bloodstone
Like a lot of Marvel superheroes, Elsa Bloodstone's history is way more complex than it seems like it should be. Originally introduced in 2001 as Marvel's thinly veiled equivalent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Elsa is actually the daughter of an existing character who's even more obscure than she is: Ulysses Bloodstone. He was a short-lived, pulpy monster hunter from the '70s who was a caveman who found a magic meteor that embedded itself in his chest and made him immortal. See? We're not even out of the first paragraph yet and Elsa's already got a complicated backstory.
There's a bigger problem, though. After Ulysses died, Elsa took over the family business of protecting the Marvel Universe from its long-established supply of haints and Draculas, and a reboot in the pages of Nextwave made her a hyperviolent, acerbic slayer who was basically the John Wick of vampire killers. The thing is, outside of the Blade movies, which haven't been a thing in 15 years, there's no real supernatural element to the Marvel movies. Dracula never fought the movie X-Men, and the MCU Captain America never had to chop the head off a Nazi vampire, and was most certainly never turned into a werewolf. There's a chance that the Marvel movies could just go off the deep end and drop a whole supernatural subgenre on us, but connecting all that to the existing MCU would take a lot of work, especially when it comes to establishing a legacy of dealing with all these threats.
So should Elsa Bloodstone be in a movie? Absolutely. She's one of Marvel's most underused characters, and despite having appearances that are relatively few and far between, she's a fan-favorite in the supernatural corners of the universe. Will Elsa Bloodstone be in a movie? Not unless they take some time to lay a whole lot of groundwork first.
The Squadron Supreme
The latest trailers for Spider-Man: Far From Home hint at the existence of a full-on Marvel Movie Multiverse, and if that actually is where we're going with these things, there's no limit of how weird things could get. If they really wanted to go all-out though, and take a jaw-dropping shot at the Distinguished Competition, they could always do a movie about the Squadron Supreme.
If you don't know why that would be a big deal, here's the short version: The Squadron Supreme are Marvel's version of the Justice League, complete with a non-powered billionaire vigilante who fights crime by night (Nighthawk), a warrior princess from an isolated mythological island (Zarda), and ... well, basically a dude who's just Superman (Hyperion). They're often used as a stand-in for DC's biggest characters, to the point where, in a crossover comic between the JLA and the Avengers, Hawkeye referred to the Justice League as a bunch of Squadron Supreme ripoffs.
It would be one thing to have the Hulk effortlessly punching out Not-Quite-Superman, but imagine if they played it completely straight. Marvel Studios deciding to just go ahead and doing their own Justice League movie would be hilarious, but it's also the kind of megacorporation-vs-megacorporation declaration of war that exists in cyberpunk stories that end with all humans having their thoughts owned by Taco Bell or something. For all our sakes, let's hope they don't.