The 5 Unlikely Marvel Movies That Could Be Great
Marvel Studios, the big company responsible for movies like Iron Man and the Avengers, has been making some really successful movies, both financially speaking, and in terms of popularity. And not just popular with a few comic book fans, but with the non comic book reading masses as well. But this statement isn’t really a profound revelation. It’s about as obvious as saying “you know, the grass is green,” even if not all of us are fans of this branch of films.
That was me trying to get my bile out of my system. I’ve never made it a secret that I really don’t care for what this studio does. There’s only so many times that I can find myself wishing I was having my vital organs removed by a serial killer instead of watching a Thor movie. But for the purposes of this article, I’m gonna be trying my darndest to not be yelling and ranting every other sentence. So as of now, I’m putting on my positive britches, and we’re moving forward with the rest of this piece. 
So even though the Marvel Studios folks have done stuff in their Superhero movies that nobody else has done before or sense at other studios, there’s still some stuff missing. Characters, concepts and stories that we will never see. Not just at Marvel Studios, but at ANY of the studios churning out these movies off the assembly line. Because some of the stuff that’s popped up in the comics just isn’t a bankable enough character/concept or story to warrant getting its own film, or even showing up in a film period. Now I should say that Marvel is trying very hard to get stuff on the big screen that I never in a quadrillion years thought would make it into a movie. We’re getting a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. How mind bendingly insane is that? In terms of popularity, the Guardians have never been extremely popular, and so it is all the more puzzling that some big wig somewhere said that it would be a good idea to put several million dollars behind this very obscure property and turn it into a big budget blockbuster. So if Guardians of the Galaxy is going to get its own movie in a few months, then we should never say never in regards to anything else at Marvel. Except for maybe Irving Forbush. Or a cinematic version of the Merry Marvel Marching Society theme song. But other than those things, I’ve put together a list of things that, right now, I just don’t think we’ll ever be seeing on the big screen. Keep in mind, if I had compiled this list 2 and a half years ago, Guardians of the Galaxy could have easily been on here. So in 5 years, archeologists might look back on this article and laugh at my doubt and cynicism. And people with other jobs might look back on it and laugh, too. But for now, this is a list of 5 things that I think we’re very unlikely to see (and for almost all of them, I’d love to be proven wrong). 
WHAT IT IS: This is one that, even if the big wigs thought it was a marketable concept and could make a good movie, I don’t know if they would actually go there. I can see it now. DC announces a Justice League movie to come out in 20whenever, and then Marvel announces one for the same year. I for one have always liked the Squadron. Actually, I’ve always liked thinly veiled homages in general. 
Sinister/Supreme, same thing. Can you guess who these guys are supposed to resemble?
Used to be, all that it took to get me to buy a comic was to create a character named Rat-Man who lives with his butler and sidekick, Hummingbird, and fights his archenemy, Court Jester. These days, though, the theft has to have something that differentiates it enough from the originator to make me want to check it out. And the Squadron Supreme, I think, is a premise that does that. Mark Gruenwald really made these characters sing in a way that, sadly, nobody else was able to do before or since. WHY WE WILL NEVER SEE IT IN A MOVIE: Three reasons. One, it’s too similar to the Justice League. Now sure, they could go the J Michael Straczynski route and make the characters all grim n gritty, but I’d rather they didn’t. That’s a fad that I could do without for the next 55 billion years. But yeah, even people who don’t read comics, they could pretty quickly get the idea that the Squadron is supposed to be the Justice League, and while the team has existed in the comics since the 1970s, I’m just not sure how okay DC Comics would be with Marvel doing a movie of them.
I don’t know how Marvel Studios would handle using the Squadron but keeping them in their own little world. Especially since Marvel Studios has built their entire empire on every movie being connected. I truly don’t think they could even do a Squadron movie without trying to fit in a stinger for the next Thor movie, even though Thor would exist in another reality. (And yeah, I guess they could just have the Squadron exist in the same world as Cap and Thor and Iron Man, etc. But then, for me, anyway, the team and the concept of a world where the rules can be broken and we can see different kinds of stories, would be lost if Hyperion and Nighthawk are just part of the Marvel Studios Universe.) 
(Specifically, the Jessica Drew kind)
WHAT IT IS: I recently read some of Jessica Drew’s adventures and, while I cannot say that many of them were very good, I did really come to love and appreciate the character. This was a really strange thing where, Marvel had a name, and they were afraid that someone else was going to try and copyright it, so they wanted to get there first. On a sidenote: the reason I don’t feel so bad for them when studios like Sony and Fox are making movies just to keep the characters from reverting back to the owners. Marvel was pulling these tactics 20 years before we even started getting movies from Marvel regularly. With a character name, they then basically started throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. She was a highly evolved spider that HYDRA brainwashed into working for them. Then she’s a normal human being with Spider powers, and a mystical mentor figure not unlike Merlin. Then she’s a bounty hunter working with the police and a wheel chair bound Oracle type 10 years before DC had the actual Oracle. And then she was depowered for a while, and very few people were even using her until Brian Michael Bendis started using her in the 2000s as part of his Avengers stuff. And while stuff like her rogues gallery, her supporting cast and the premise of the series was constantly in flux, her personality, that of a woman trying to find her own identity, was always pretty consistent. And that is what made me come to love this character. WHY WE WON'T SEE IT: The “spider” part in her name. Admittedly, in her first appearance, she went back and forth from being called Arachne to Spider-Woman to Arachne again. So I guess, if Marvel really wanted to use this character, they could call her Arachne. But then I’ve heard that Marvel Studios, while they’re barred from using Spider-Man characters (which Jessica Drew is not), they are also barred from using characters with spider POWERS, which would include characters like Arana Cortez, Julia Carpenter and Jessica Drew. None of these characters are actually Spider-Man characters, even if they have met Spidey himself a few times. So they technically would almost certainly fall in the list of characters Marvel Studios could use in their own movies. But Jessica’s powers are a little trickier. If you take away all of her Spider powers, she doesn’t have much left. I guess you could use her venom blasts, and that’s about it, since that’s not a power that Spidey himself has.
But still, if there even WAS a director or screenwriter out there who was interested in this character, it’d be a pretty hard sell to the big wigs. But hey, Guardians movie. So what do I know. If it was me, I’d want to see an entire movie focusing on the “miracles” of the Marvel movie-verse, which is Marvel’s way of saying Mutants without actually saying Mutants. I’d LOVE to somehow see an entire team of Avengers who are “Miracles” (still such a dumb phrasing, but whatever). Throw Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Jessica Drew and Wonder Man on a team, and I’d watch that movie with great vigor. Since a couple of these guys had syntheticly derived powers in the comics, and that’s apparently the origin of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in the movies, then they could pretty easily use the origin for Mutants from the Ultimate Universe, where Mutants are a man-made phenomena that are only about 40 or 50 years old. That’d be a cool thing to see, in my humble, and since I want to see it, we know it will never actually happen. 
WHAT IT IS: We all know and love this concept, right? Supervillains pretending to be superheroes. It’s solid gold. Now if it were me, I’d want to see the original premise of the team, where a group of villains all create new identities as heroes, and actually do some heroic stuff to gain the trust of the public, so that they can then do evil stuff without the interference of the forces of law and order. After all, when the world trusts and loves you, it’s easier to do, well, anything, really. This would naturally only last for about 1 movie. Presumably, at the end of movie 1, you’d have one of the villains with a heart of gold decide that he or she actually likes being a good guy, and doesn’t want to go along with the villain’s plans.
WHY WE WON'T SEE IT: For a few reasons. One, we don’t have enough villains showing up in these movies. A big problem with superhero movies since the Tim Burton Batman movie is that these movies seem to think that the best way to end is for the hero to kill the villain. And while a lot of people will try to tell you that the Marvel Studios movies are ahead of the curve and are better than breathing, they are still falling into this trap just like everyone else (or even worse than some franchises. Even the Fox Fantastic Four and X-Men movies kept their most well known villains alive for multiple movies). Looking back, every Iron Man movie has ended with a villain dying. The Captain America movie probably had Red Skull die, though I guess he could come back (though with Hugo Weaving dissing the Marvel movies, I doubt he will). And then beyond those movies, all that you really have left is Loki, because apparently he’s the only villain that Marvel can actually use multiple times (also the one I’m least interested in seeing appear in every movie til 2028). 
Hawkeye's Thunderbolts team vs the Avengers.
So speaking practically, there’s no way that these movies could even DO a villain protagonist movie like this because part of what made the Thunderbolts work was that we already knew these guys were villains by the end of issue 1. The movie would be extremely clunky if you had to introduce these heroes who are actually villains only pretending to be heroes. It’d be so much easier if, say, Whiplash was already introduced in Iron Man 2, and then he went to jail and escaped and then created an identity as “The Whip Master” or something, as part of the Thunderbolts. And also, I just don’t see any studio doing a villain protagonist movie. I’ve said it before, but I’d love to see MANY villains get their own movies. Kingpin, Magneto, Mystique, Loki (yes, I said I’m tired of seeing him, but I could get untired very quickly if it meant we would get Loki: Secret Agent of Asgard as the premise of a movie). And before anyone rushes to their keyboard to tell me that the Sinister Six are getting their own movie, yes, I know. But we know next to nothing about what that movie will be about right now. For all we know, the Six might even be closer to the “good” side of things rather than be actual villains. But I suspect that how well the Sinister Six movie does, financially and critically, will determine if we’ll be getting more daring less formulaic movies that could go so far as to focus on the villains. 
...or scenarios, or characters.
WHAT IT IS: This is quite a bit more broad then some of the other things I mentioned, but it’s still part of the Marvel Universe, and I have what I feel is a pretty valid reason for why I don’t think we’re going to be seeing stuff like Killraven, the REAL Guardians of the Galaxy (yes, I’m bitter that the team I’ve loved my entire life isn’t getting its due, and hasn’t been for the last 7 years) or any of the 2099 stuff (in that case, they wouldn’t be able to use Spider-Man and X-Men 2099, which would kinda knock out about half of what made that universe interesting in the first place). The closest that I think we’ll get to seeing a future landscape or world from the comics show up in the movies is this month’s X-Men Days of Future Past. And even then, that movie is changing up quite a bit of the stuff from the comics (not that I mind that in the least), so it’s less of a future and more of an alternate present and the past.
WHY WE WON'T SEE IT: For the same reason that I knew we would never get a Green Lantern movie using the plot of the Sinestro Corps War from the comics. I may be the only person who thinks like this, but when thinking of material from the comic books to be lifted and used in the movies, I usually think of it in linear terms. For instance, it still bothers me that in the Amazing Spider-Man 2, Peter fights the Harry Osborn Green Goblin before fighting Norman Osborn. For me, if someone said at Marvel said “let’s start mining some of these futures from the comics” it would be like if someone wanted to do a Hulk movie, and start with World War Hulk, without doing a movie with the previous 50 years of Hulk stories. Or do a Doctor Strange movie where you start with him wearing the eye patch and calling himself Stephen Saunders. Or a Green Lantern movie that uses the Sinestro Corps War as a plot, even though there was still 50 or 60 years of other Green Lantern stories out there that could have been mined first. 
X-Men 2099
I feel like if they were to do a movie set in the year 2099 (which, out of all of the futures I mentioned here, is probably the least likely to happen, since the rights to the character names are split across three companies), then that would kinda sorta be like them admitting that they don’t have anything left to do with the stories in the present day. And I don’t even believe that, really. Like I said, I like stories set in the future. Heck, my internet alias includes the number 2099. But I just don’t see these movies going there anytime soon. Not when we still have so much ground to cover with the present day characters. Although I guess I should never say never. The Winter Soldier movie did exactly what bothers me by going from his origin in the 1940s in the first movie to a story that isn’t even 10 years old for us the audience in the second movie, effectively skipping all of the stuff done by Kirby, Englehart, Kirby again, Gruenwald and many others. But hey, people loved that movie, so I guess whatever works for them will work for them. 
WHAT IT IS: It probably won’t surprise you to know that this one is a third thing that has always worked in getting me interested in something. These things always happen in threes, right? Back when I was younger, I was about 100 times more interested in the teenage superheroes than I was the adult superheroes. It was why I even bothered checking out Heinberg’s Young Avengers, even though I had never cared for the adult Avengers. (some things never change) It was why I was so rabidly in love with the Teen Titans. (some things never change) I always loved the characters who were closer to my age. So even though I’m not nearly as into the teen characters as I was back then, I still think it’d be cool if we could get some of the characters who are more recent and not from the Silver Age of comics.
Yeah, Iron Man is about 10 years older than Thor and Cap, physically speaking, but other than that, this universe is pretty much populated with people in their late 20s/early 30s. It’d be neat to see that this world has younger heroes. And older heroes. It would make it feel more like a universe than what it actually is right now, which is just a snapshot of a wider, broader world. WHY WE WON'T SEE IT: For the same reason I mentioned about the stuff from the future. Marvel isn’t going to risk several million dollars on a Young Avengers project when people who hear about it are going to laugh themselves to death and compare it to the Muppet Babies cartoon of the 1990s. And then with most of these other teenage characters, they’re so incredibly obscure, I’m not sure if we’d ever see them show up in a movie anywhere, let alone in their own movie. (but again, Guardians of the Galaxy) Essentially, at the end of the day, there’s still so much to mine that relates to the adult heroes, that I don’t think they’re going to be thinking about how to introduce teenage heroes who are a much more recent invention (with the exception of Toro) to the mix.
And that’s my list, guys. It’s a little (a lot) lengthy, but the best kinds of list are worth it, right? What do you guys think of my list? It’s mostly speculative, and like I said at the beginning, I could very well be wrong about most of these. I’d love to be, since a lot of what I talked about here would get me excited for the movies, which is something that I can’t say too often (about movies in general, that wasn’t a shot at Marvel Studios). Are there things that you think we will never see in a Marvel movie? Are there things on this list you think I’m wildly wrong about? Let’s have your comments below, Trash Miracles! (no, it’s just not going to ever sound okay). ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ReuBen DeBord has written a few things on the internet. On the wunderkind of a website, the Essential Webcomics Showcase, he has written a few pieces you may have heard of, such as "50 Reasons why I hate Smallville", and his ongoing series called “If It’s Broken, they won’t fix it.” If you don’t feel like waiting 5 months for him to put something on that website, then you can go to his Youtube page, where he tries to put up content a couple of times a week, and has even managed to squeeze out content once a day, for a while there. This is where you can see him review movies, comics and things that are just kinda related to this corner of pop culture.
Outside of his writing, there are rumors that ReuBen is a surviving clone of some kind. Either from the Clone Wars, or an unknown from Peter Parker’s past. Either way, he’s pretty crazy. It’s a good thing he focuses 95 percent of his energy on writing stuff for the internet. 
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