The Penguin: Comic-Book Stories Are Still Ashamed of Being Comic-Book Stories
When Fox put the first X-Men movie together, producers looked at the pages of the comics and worried about whether moviegoers would be put off by the silly clowns dancing around on the pages even as they salivated at the potential profits those silly clowns promised. They took inspiration from The Matrix, according to Kevin Feige, and instead put the team in black leather–and then wrote in a joke about yellow spandex just to remind us what a bunch of dummies we are for liking the source material, comic books.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Marvel Studios has changed the conversation, giving us great-looking, faithful reproductions of characters like Wolverine, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, and Spider-Man among many others. They made $30 billion doing it. So why are there still so many productions out there that seem to be terrified of acknowledging their source material?
DC recently debuted the movie Joker: Folie à Deux, and we’re a few episodes into HBO’s The Penguin–two dramatic adaptations of well-known DC villains that promise an in-depth look at these villains as if they were real people. Both seem to be begging us every minute to forget that they’re based on comics.