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"Watch all these movies, and then you have our permission to die."

You only need to go outside and wait for a bus to go past to know that comic book movies are pretty huge right now. You don’t even know to go outside (and let’s face it, you probably don’t want to do that); just open up your web browser to a random page and chances are you’ll be met with an advertisement for an upcoming comic book adaptation sooner or later. The darn things are everywhere.

And in fact, comic book movies are so huge right now that two of the top ten highest-grossing films of 2013 were based on comic books. This year, it’s already three of the top ten – and this number will most likely become four when Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy – the next installment in the MCU franchise – makes its way into cinemas over the course of the summer (it has a talking raccoon – c’mon!).

Comic books movies haven’t always been viable filmic ventures, though, given that cinema had to advance on a technological level in order to meet the required adaptive levels; there existed a long and tedious period of time before the likes of Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman, where comic book comics were pretty darn awful. And it wasn’t really until the earlier 2000s, when X-Men and Spider-Man came out, that the genre truly came into its own…

And now we’re living in the age of comic book movies, of course, where the biggest, most expensive and – let’s face it – most popular motion pictures shipping into theatres are sourced from existing works – works comprised of hundreds of pages filled up with little illustrated squares.

Join us, then, as we cast an eye back across the spectrum of comic book movies that have shaped and transformed the genre; 20 Comic Book Movies You Must See Before You Die…

It’s important to say that, above all, Zack Snyder’s faithful adaptation of what is often regarded to be the greatest comic book of all time is deeply flawed. In an attempt to please the incredibly dedicated fans of Alan Moore’s seminal work, Snyder opted to pretty much copy and paste the frames of Watchmen and render them as a feature film; given the legacy that clings to such a highly thought of work, you can hardly blame him. As a result of this approach, though, the movie feels a little bit “flat.”

That said, Watchmen remains an essential comic book movie that everyone interested in the genre should seek out; the cinematography is wonderful, the casting admirable, and it also happens to contain what is undoubtably the best and most memorable opening credits sequence in comic book movie history. Given the rich mythology inherent to the source material, it’s impressive how Snyder manages to create a coherent film, though Watchmen still remains a definitive lesson in how essential it is for a movie to be made as a movie, and not as a carbon copy of the source material. Still, in a way, the movie’s flaws also grant it with an added layer of intrigue.

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This article was first posted on June 19, 2014

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