The world mourned the passing of Leonard Nimoy on February 27th, 2015.
Let me emphasize that; the world mourned the passing of Leonard Nimoy.
Why was that?
After all, his largest contribution to society was as an actor, and at that, an actor known largely for only playing one character. Even in a world overly obsessed with celebrities, his death seemed to hit a collective nerve.
To put that in perspective, the world will probably not collectively pass the mourning of the actor who played Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch.
No offense to whatever his name is; I’m sure he’s a terrific man whose friends and family love him for whom he is.
No. The world mourned Leonard Nimoy because he was associated with the character of Spock for roughly forty-six years…and admittedly, some lines were blurred. Nimoy infamously authored a book titled I Am Not Spock only to author another book years later proclaiming Well, Yeah, I Am Spock.*
*Not the actual title.
Most of the world did not know Leonard Nimoy personally, in other words. They did not know the man. They could not call him friend. It wasn’t his death they necessarily mourned as much as the fact that he would never portray Spock again, and because his portrayal of that character had brought so much joy to them. Nimoy made Spock real to many people.
There was an emotional investment by a large part of the world in the character of Spock...and that's ultimately want any writer wants from their fans. That connection. Star Trek (The Original Series) has a somewhat unique history in the annals of entertainment history. It was a television show that was always on the verge of cancellation, and only made it three years before it finally was. Then it found a new life in the syndication market, kept alive by that and the fans that began holding conventions expressing their love for the show. That lead to a brief animated series before it was resurrected on the big screen, spawning a movie franchise that ultimately also led to the birth of four new television shows, as well as countless novels and comic books.
Generations now have grown up with Star Trek. Although TOS was well over before I was even born, I was thirteen when The Next Generation premiered; I was twenty when it ended. Through all the trials and tribulations of high school and into my early adult life, those characters were surrogate friends and family that were there mayhap when things weren’t going smashingly well with my real life friends and family. I can still remember rushing home after working a third shift job to watch the series finale I had taped to say goodbye to those old friends. When the Borg came back in First Contact to bedevil the Enterprise crew again, I understood Picard’s rage and pain. After all, I had watched the Borg’s effect on him over the course of six years. I had watched him cry to his brother in a pool of mud over it.
Much like I had grown up with TNG, people had the character of Spock in their lives for decades.
What does this have to do with comic book movies, you might be asking this far in?
As comic book fans, we all have also grown up with these characters. Come to know them. Come to care about them. Come to be protective of them as if they were our own. Writers may (understandably) get upset when comic book fans take umbrage at a storyline or a radical change in the original concept of a character; yet at the same time, writers also always have to keep in mind that without the fans, they wouldn’t have a job. It's a symbiotic relationship.
This, above all else, is why the majority of the comic book fan community goes berserk when filmmakers attempt to change them from what we’ve grown up reading for most of our lives.
What if, for instance, when they had made Star Trek: The Motion Picture, they’d decided to change Spock's appearance to him having red skin, a Mohawk, and round ears? Even if they had nailed the essence of the character, how would the Star Trek fan base have reacted? He may have acted like Spock, but he wouldn’t have looked like Spock.
But let’s take it the other way. What if Spock had still looked like the Spock of TOS, but the character was written to act nothing like it was established in TOS? What if he was…well, unfortunately much like Zachary Quinto’s Spock in the reboot?
Because that’s an interesting conundrum, now. We once again have Kirk and Spock on the big screen…and although I’ve found the films watchable (the first more than the second), I could care less about them. They’re a Kirk and Spock, but they’re not the Kirk and Spock, no matter how hard they try to spin the alternate timeline to explain the many differences (like Spock and Uhura bumping Tribbles). I haven’t grown up with these versions of them. I don’t have any emotional attachment to them—nor are they well written enough for me to form them even within the confines of the movie. When Spock dies in The Wrath of Khan, I still get tears in my eyes (even knowing Spock’s death was ultimately undone). When Kirk dies in Star Trek into Darkness, I distinctly remember looking at my friend and asking him how long it would be until they figured out Khan’s blood would save him.
More so, I know that—at most—these versions may do one more movie and then there’ll be the inevitable reboot or just an end to the new universe. I doubt Pine and Quinto will be interested in doing Star Trek movies into their golden years like Shatner and Nimoy were (because unlike most of the TOS movie cast, they all have healthy acting careers outside Star Trek). They could have left Kirk dead at the end of STID and I would have shrugged.
This is the problem with comic book movies that put characters on screen that don’t capture that core essence of what we’ve come to know and love, be it aesthetically or their core character. Which is unfortunate because these filmmakers already have a guaranteed fan base going in, unlike films not based on a previous written work (i.e., original material, which is far and few these days as it is in the age of reboots and remakes). Original films sometimes have to spend an inordinate amount of time getting you to come to care about that character(s); with comic book movies, most of the viewers going in already do.
And I’m not talking literal translations of either characters or storylines; Marvel has done its fair share of changing things up. So has Fox and Sony. I’ve read the…debates…in the comments and personally I don’t care which studio makes the film as long as it’s a good film (although then we miss out on shared universes depending on legal wrangling). The best retort I can give to that is the example of the Spider-Man animated series from the 90’s and the more recent Spectacular Spider-Man animated series; they tried different things (Hobgoblin came before Green Goblin in the former, for instance) yet at their hearts, the essence of the characters were the same. I recognized them as the characters I grew up reading about—and in that vein, I don’t want to see storylines that are just literal adaptions of comic storylines, either.
Now, take Nicholas Hammond in the ill-fated live-action Spider-Man on CBS in the 70’s. His Peter Parker never suffered the death of Uncle Ben; Aunt May disappeared after the pilot; his Spider-Man didn’t make jokes…even given the obvious special effects limitations of the time, there just wasn’t much about him or his universe that truly resembled the character from the comics. Even the Spider-Man costume that was worn on The Electric Company seemed more authentic than the one on the CBS show.
What emotional investment are we supposed to have in these characters if we can’t relate to them in that aspect? Especially in this age of (at best) trilogy and then inevitable reboot? Or one crappy movie and then a reboot? Why should I go see the upcoming Fantastic Four—based allegedly largely on the Ultimate version—when they vaguely resemble the Fantastic Four I grew up with? At this rate I might as well just sit back and wait for the next inevitable reboot—whether it be after this film fails or it succeeds and they do it after a trilogy—and hope it’s based on Kirby and Lee’s version (and set in the 60’s...one can hope). Why should I care about this version and—most importantly to Hollywood—spend my hard earned money on it?
Of course, I realize the argument can be made that by now, many current comic book fans have grown up on the Ultimate version of these characters instead of the 616 versions.
I accept that and counter it with this: I grew up watching Johnny Carson, and now we have Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. It’s the difference between prime rib and bologna, son.
However, that’s an opinion, and ultimately, you can’t please everybody no matter what direction you go. But then the risk by the filmmakers is alienating one fan base over another; is the Ultimate universe more popular and well-known than the 616 universe? I would say no since the 616 has been around longer—even non-comic fans have a passing knowledge of the 616 universe characters.
There’s also another issue. Fatigue.
My old man was never a comic book reader, but having a son who did, he came to know the characters by osmosis. Whenever I buy a comic book movie on DVD, I give it to him to watch. We actually went to see Raimi’s first Spider-Man together (being the character he knew best) and he enjoyed it, and watched the other two in that series when I gave it to him.
When The Amazing Spider-Man came out and I gave it to him to watch, he got this weird look on his face and said “What happened to the other guy?”
“They rebooted it.”
“’Rebooted it? Like a computer?’”
“Well...”
He had no interest in watching it. To him, he’d already watched three movies about Spider-Man. He wasn’t going to start all over again with a new version and sit through another origin story and all that. Hell, my old man doesn’t watch the same movie twice as it is—you’re not going to pull him into endless rehashes of the same thing over and over again.
For that matter, even my wife who is not a comic book fan, but who has (albeit begrudgingly) sat with me through most comic book movies, refused to go see The Amazing Spider-Man for much the same reason.
I’m getting sick of reboots/remakes and I like comic books—do these filmmakers really think the general movie going public is going to keep going back to that same well? I hate to break it to them—that well is already starting to run dry. I think Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a prime enough example of that. The only saving grace of that movie was they finally got the costume right from the unfinished one made by Spalding in the first one; I'm convinced now that it's impossible for Hollywood to get the Green Goblin right. There’s a finite amount of times they can try to bring these characters to the big screen—and to get it right—before people just stop coming to the rodeo.
And maybe for younger readers, it’s hard to understand because you’ve grown up in what has really been a glorious age of comic book movies the past fifteen years or so—and by glorious, I mean the fact that they were made. I grew up in the 80s. The best comic book movie back then until Batman came out was still a toss-up between Superman and Superman II, both of which were technically made in the 70’s. You can’t imagine how much we as kids pined back then for not only a comic book movie, but a good one. We were stuck watching reruns of live-action Spider-Man, Adam West Batman, The Incredible Hulk (good show for its time, but not the comic book Hulk), Wonder Woman, those awful Captain America TV movies, stuff like Misfits of Science, Manimal, Automan…even the cartoons were terrible. Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was cringe worthy even as a kid.
THE DOG! WHY WAS THERE A FREAKING DOG!
It’s not just enough that they make the movies anymore and slap names on characters that are nothing like their comic counterparts. Especially now that these franchises are entering their second or even third attempts. I used to religiously go see every comic book movie that came out in the theater; The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, Green Lantern, Thor 2, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Days of Future Past, and Guardians of the Galaxy I all waited until they came on DVD or streaming (and some were rentals, not purchases) to watch. The only two I regret not going to see are DOFP and GOTG; I liked both of them immensely. The rest to me weren’t worth the $12 or so I would have spent…and I’m a guy who has disposable income. Not always the case with younger fans.
All we ask is that the filmmakers make the characters recognizable and respect their roots. Fantastic Four doesn’t have to be dark and gritty and Interstellar. Superman doesn’t have to be a nomad who can’t take any joy in the fact that he’s…well…Superman. Peter Parker doesn’t have to be constantly on the verge of crying over Mary Jane (one of my beefs with the Raimi films).
These characters have been around longer than most of us have been alive and will probably be around long after most of us are dead. They don’t need to be reimagined or have the director's trademark or "vision" thrust upon them. Respect the source material and the money will roll in like it came off a printing press.
Flame On in the comments.