There's nothing like getting what you want to make you wish you'd never wanted it in the first place. Many years ago, comic book geeks like myself used to wish for one...just one...decent big-screen adaptation of the adventures of our favorite superheroes; now, capes and cowls are so prevalent on the big screen that we're getting good and sick of them. The give-and-take we used to long for between the comic book industry and the motion picture business has become alarmingly one-sided; the funnybook biz is in one of the most precarious financial states it's ever seen, even as superhero adaptations teeter on the brink of billion-dollar box office business.
Things aren't likely to change, either. Even dedicated comics-to-film watchers like us were a bit shocked when we stumbled across this post at Den of Geek: it lists no less than seventy-five film adaptations of comic books that are said to be coming down the pike. Even if their definition of "comic book movie" is a little elastic (Sherlock Holmes and Conan villain Thulsa Doom are both referred to as comics properties), that's a hell of a lot of four-color heroes headed to the big screen. Even if as little as a third of them actually end up getting made, this is what is technically referred to as a "glut".
Of the seventy-five listed, how many will actually be worth watching, assuming they're actually completed? That remains to be seen. A lot of these look pretty dismal (bad juju already surrounds the Green Arrow prison flick Super Max, the Flash movie is probably permanently stalled, and the success of the Luke Cage picture depends entirely on whether it's directed by the John Singleton who did Boyz n tha Hood or the John Singleton who did 2 Fast 2 Furious), but we'd be lying if we said that the prospect of a movie version of The Hands of Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu -- directed by Yuen Woo-Ping and produced by Ang Lee -- didn't get our nerd juices flowing.
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