In order for a comic book movie to be successful, director Joss Whedon says the film must embrace the spirit of its source material while remembering that it’s a movie.
Whedon says that when it came to directing The Avengers, he looked at the recent history of comic book adaptations as a guide to crafting the screen play and directing the movie.
“It’s capturing the essence of the comic and being true to what’s wonderful about it, while remembering that it’s a movie and not a comic. I think Spider-Man, the first one particularly, really captured [the spirit of the comic]. They figured out the formula of oh, tell the story that they told in the comic. It was compelling, that’s why it’s iconic, but at the same time they did certain things that only a movie can do [but] were in the vein of the comic,” he tells Badass Digest.
“I think you see things like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where they just threw out the comic, or Watchmen, where they do it frame for frame, and neither of them work. You have to give the spirit of the thing and then step away from that, and create something cinematic and new,” Whedon adds.
I think The Watchmen worked near perfectly with the frame by frame but that’s mainly because it was a single story. It wouldn’t work with a serial comic because there’s usually so much source material to choose from you have to make more decisions on what to include. Although I disagree about Watchmen I still then J.W. has the right idea. Although part of me would kind of like to see a frame by frame of the original Batman so we can see him killing people, smoking a pipe, living in New York and chasing after his fiance. Just to show how much the character has changed.