Since we here at the Screengrab are determined to absolutely flood you with news about big-screen superhero comic adaptations until you get so annoyed that you personally come to our offices and spill Diet Coke all over our mint-condition issue of X-Men #137, we feel it's our duty to bring you the bad news as well as the good. No, we're not talking about the bad news that most of these movies are going to kind of suck; that you can take as a given. We're talking about the bad news that as shocking as it may seem, Hollywood may be running out of superheroes.
As reported in Variety, the big studios have already strip-mined almost every first- and second-tier superhero title that Marvel, DC and the independents have to offer (and some third-tier ones as well — we're lookin' at you, Ghost Rider). This fact, combined with less than stellar box office reception for a handful of recent superhero movies (we are, once again, lookin' right at you, Ghost Rider) and the surprising popular and critical reception given to non-mainstream comic book adaptations of non-superhero material, may mean that producers will start increasingly looking for the next Sin City, American Splendor or A History of Violence.
An adaptation of Greg Rucka's unconventional police procedural, Whiteout, is already in the works, and Brian Michael Bendis' deconstruction of the Eliot Ness, Torso, may be David Fincher's next project (Bendis himself is writing the screenplay to a movie version of his spy thriller, Jinx). But there's still a pile of terrific graphic novels — not a one of them featuring men in tights — that could made a terrific movie: Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show are both smart, well-crafted comedies; James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing is both a visually stunning piece of storytelling and a powerful period piece about race and religion; Dan Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is a natural for a surrealist in the David Lynch mode (even if Clowes has already joked about what a catastrophe a filmed version of the book would be, he proved himself wrong once already with Ghost World); and someday, someone's got to do something with Paul Chadwick's Concrete, which takes what could be a hackneyed sci-fi narrative and turns it into a surprisingly deep and emotional character study. Maybe it's time for Hollywood to look past not only the cape, but the companies behind them, and give indie publishers as much of a chance as they give indie film.