Over the last few years, we were subjected to 2 rather controversial (at best) movie sequels from popular comic book franchises-- Spider-Man 3 & X-Men: The Last Stand. Both of them took one of the most popular story lines from the comics, shoe-horned it in with a bunch of other unrelated crap, and ended up sapping nearly all the juice out of the concept without ever really doing anything with it. Spider-Man 3 did it with Venom. X-Men: The Last Stand did it with Phoenix. My question is, which storyline got botched more?
X3 = awesome, Phoenix scenes were pure awesomeness Spider man 3 - semi awesome Though I found Venom really annoying, they had the wrong actor for the role, and why the fu** did they keep showing his face when he was Venom? Stupid
Venom, at least, got some development; in fact, I'd say it was Sandman who was short-shrifted in that film. Both the black suit and Topher Grace's character had a goodly amount of screen time; only after the two melded did things seem to speed up uncontrollably. Phoenix, on the other hand, remained a cipher throughout the film, killing loved ones and allying herself with Magneto seemingly without reason, never really interacting with other characters given the autistic portrayal... Yes, definately the Phoenix was the storylined that failed the most to live up to its potential. Also, Venom might be getting his (its?) own spinoff, whereas I think we've seen all of Phoenix we're ever going to see, barring some reboot many years down the line... Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Hmm, that's a tough question. Two beloved comic characters were given horrible short shrifts to cram into a sequel. Both also with interstellar origins (and therein lies the problem!). Phoenix made sense within the movies in that it was just her evil inner self. And by making her evil with no exterior reason, quite frankly the less time dwelt on it the better! Venom however had his (unexplained) alien origin, his (abbreviated) character origin, but got zero screen time and didn't appear until the last 20 minutes. I'd go with Venom.
One thing that the Marvel films have pretty much failed at are real 'out there' alien stuff. Take the FF franchise with it's watered-down Silver Surfer and Galactus for example.It's a shame really, since Marvel has a really fleshed out "cosmic" universe which has yet to come across well in film. I actually think they should've worked in the Ultimate instead of alien origin of Venom. They actually kind of took that route with the Topher Grace version of Eddie (sort of-he certainly wasn't the big guy from the regular Marvel universe!)
While both versions of the characters differed somewhat significantly from their traditional portrayal in other media, I think that X3's Phoenix was improved if only because it offered something slightly different in the psychological aspects of the Phoenix, whereas SM3 offered a meager amalgam of the mainstream and ultimate continuities. I would have preferred to have a full good Phoenix then become Dark Phoenix but the alien aspects of her origin don't really fit with the universe the X-Men movies created, IMHO.
I would have to say Venom. Although, I would have to say Spider-Man 3 as a whole is actually worse than X-Men 3 for the sole reason that it ret-conned the way Uncle Ben died by shoehorning the Sandman into that narrative. That was forced and an unnecessary inclusion. There are whole bunch of other problems related to Spider-Man 3, but at least with X-Men 3, even if the viewer does not enjoy it as much as the previous entries it at least does not ruin the 2 previous entries that came before it. Spider-Man 3, on the otherhand obviously does, because Spider-Man's whole reason for becoming a superhero in the first place was due to Uncle Ben's death, and Sam Raimi (A director that I had the displeasure of meeting.) shouldn't have messed with that.
phoenix - most botched up. actually x3 in general was just a botch up. 2 good story lines ground down to 1.5 hours of nothing. fyi action does not make story lines, for people who think x3 was best because of action. phoenix could have been salvagable if they hadn't cut the movie to 1.5 hours and made it the wolvercrap show. x2 was more an ensemble thing. not to say venom was not botched because it was too. i really don't get why movie makers LOVE dual-villainy in movies. just use one bad guy and use him well. don't use two and water them down. though they wanted to use sandman to tie up peter's guilt over his uncle's death. they try to pack in so much into one movie that people miss out on a lot of things. at least though spidey 3 was longer than an hour and a half.
I wasn't aware that Venom *had* a plotline, beyond Brock and the symbiote both hate Parker. That's it, isn't it? We did lose the symbiote's pain of rejection, I guess. Frankly, Venom was 2-dimensional in the comics and cool to look at. In the movie, he was one-dimensional and cool to look at. Phoenix was interesting and complicated in the comics. In the movie, she kills Scott - why? She does nothing between killing X and Magneto's fall - why? Venom, while weakly done, at least made sense on the surface of it. Phoenix was nonsense in the movie. Phoenix started off better in the original, and ended up worse. She was more mishandled.
I'm afraid I don't have a firm enough grounding in the comics to comment on how Venom may or may not have been mishandled in the films. I did read the Dark Phoenix saga though. Still, that's only half the story in this case. I can say I saw Spider-Man 3 and found enough of the film enjoyable to purchase it on DVD. I can't say the same for X-Men 3, which I still haven't seen and don't intend to purchase based on advisories from numerous sources. What I've heard is enough to make me think Phoenix ultimately wins for most mishandled. So, one vote for Phoenix from a somewhat unqualified voter.
Phoenix. I got the impression that story decisions made on the X-Men films were based on an actor's box office potential rather than what the character was about. The X-Men films were always more about Wolverine. So other story lines were changed or diminished as a result. While Marvel will be agreeable on furthering the Hugh Jackman-portrayed Wolverine story (which they are), they will never do a Famke Jannsen Jean Grey/Phoenix film.
Not on it's own, but I'd suspect they would do one (or at least be open to the possibility of doing one) in the confines of a Wolverine movie, which would be fine by me. I didnt think either were "botched" paticularly. But I do prefer the Phoenix one and found that the Venom would have been better being the sole focus of the film, rather than how it ended up, so I voted Venom.
The Phoenix would have been great had it been Scott there instead of Logan. But even then it would have been mediocre as Brett Ratner is terrible.