The Problem with Non-Marvel Marvel Movies

Marvel Comics has been with us a long time, giving us superheroes of all sorts that we know and love. We also have the movies, some of which are produced by Marvel Studios. Then there are other movies with Marvel superheroes, licensed from Marvel but produced by someone other than Marvel Studios. If you know which movies are which, you can see the difference. The X-Men series is part Marvel, part non-Marvel. So is Spider-Man. And some of those outsourced movies aren’t half bad.

The rest of Marvel’s out-sourced movies have been nothing short of disasterous. Between three (technically four) Fantastic Fours, three Punishers, three Blades, two Ghost Riders, two Daredevils, one Hulk and a smattering of odds and ends (including, infamously, Howard the Duck), there has not been a single good movie.

The Blade movies all overly rely on poor CG and the tiresome acting prowess of Wesley Snipes (even if Guillermo del Toro made the second film more than just passingly forgetable). Each Fantastic Four is more artistically inept than its predecessor (and that’s saying something, given that the first was made by Roger Corman). The Ghostriders are comically inept, the Daredevils painfully angsty and the Hulk features protracted fight scenes with a Gamma-irradiated poodle.

Read more about which is which, and why those characters should all come home to Marvel, at TVOM.