13 Movies You Didn’t Realize Were Based on Comics

Recently, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt vehicle Edge of Tomorrow started trending on social media again, almost a decade after its initial release in theaters. That movie, which was a modest hit at the box office but a disappointment when compared to other big tentpoles headed up by Cruise, is one that Warner Bros. has tapped for a potential sequel in the near future. The movie, unbeknownst to most of its fans, is actually based on a manga (All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka). That got us to thinking about all of the other movies — some great, others less so — that came and went without anyone realizing they were based on comics and graphic novels.

There are dozens of them, but we wanted to boil it down a bit. We picked 13 movies that were based on comic books, graphic novels, and Manga — then sprinkled on one more that kinda-sorta counts. We’re sharing them here, in no particular order.

A few ground rules: things like SpongeBob SquarePants (which was preceded by The Intertidal Zone) and Captain Underpants won’t be on this list, and neither will some of the oddball superhero stuff like Mystery Men and Kick-Ass. That’s because, while many people don’t know exactly what comics those are based on, they very much feel like they’re based on a comic book, and in the cases of the latter they feature superheroes, so it’s not something that would surprise many viewers.

The same can be said for a number of movies — Tank Girl, Judge Dredd — and there are also some movies that deal so explicitly with comic books (like Art School Confidential, Ghost World, and American Splendor) that it’s hard to imagine viewers divorcing the two concepts in their heads. We’ve excluded those and some others for similar reasons, in order to keep the list short.

So we’re using our judgment to make up a list of things that we think most people would be baffled to learn were originally comics. Let us know on social media if you think we missed an important one.

Steel yourselves (and no, Steel is not on this list)…!

Wanted

It would be fairly easy to miss the connections between Wanted, the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones comic from Top Cow, and its extremely loose film adaptation starring Angelina Jolie. In the comic, it’s about a group of supervillains, one of whom is heir to a new role as an assassin. The movie centers a lot more on the “assassin” element than the “supervillain” element, but it’s technically Millarworld still.

RED

From celebrated comics artist Cully Hamner and disgraced writer Warren Ellis, RED centers on a trio of aging spies. One, played by Bruce Willis, accidentally ropes a woman he has a crush on into an adventure, where they are all forced to go on the run from a relentless agent (played by The Boys and Dredd star Karl Urban) tasked with killing him.

The Old Guard

Led by a warrior named Andy (Charlize Theron), a covert group of tight-knit mercenaries with a mysterious inability to die have fought to protect the mortal world for centuries. But when the team is recruited to take on an emergency mission and their extraordinary abilities are suddenly exposed, it’s up to Andy and Nile (KiKi Layne), the newest soldier to join their ranks, to help the group eliminate the threat of those who seek to replicate and monetize their power by any means necessary. Based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Greg Rucka and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball, Beyond the Lights), The Old Guard is a gritty, grounded, action-packed story that shows living forever is harder than it looks.

I Kill Giants

Nearly a decade after the comic book series was first published by Man of Action and Image Comics, Joe Kelly‘s I Kill Giants made its way to theaters in 2018. Kelly, a film and TV veteran who wrote and produced the project, told us back then that the high stakes and somewhat darker tone the film took on were an intentional move.

The film, which was also produced by Chris Columbus of Harry Potter and Home Alone fame, is the latest family film to be compared to the Amblin movies of the ’80s — but one of the elements often forgotten in the idealization of nostalgia is that movies like E.T. and The Goonies were challenging to young audiences in a way that few modern films are.

“Kids’ movies of that era did have stakes and they were scary,” Kelly told ComicBook. “You have people chasing kids with guns. Look at Goonies, and you have these people trying to murder a bunch of kids.”

From Hell

One of two books on here by Alan Moore (Watchmen), From Hell is a retelling of the story of Jack the Ripper, complete with an unorthodox theory about the killer’s identity. Originally written by Moore and drawn by Eddie Campbell (Alec), the comic was a bleak and bloody affair, which got a significantly cleaner sheen when it came to the big screen with Heather Graham and Johnny Depp.

Extraction

Based on Ciudad by Ande Parks, Extraction centers on Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) — a fearless black market mercenary with nothing left to lose when his skills are solicited to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord. But in the murky underworld of weapons dealers and drug traffickers, an already deadly mission approaches the impossible, forever altering the lives of Rake and the boy. An action-packed, edge-of-your-seat thriller directed by Sam Hargrave, EXTRACTION is an AGBO Films and TGIM Films, Inc. production, produced by Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Chris Hemsworth, Eric Gitter, and Peter Schwerin.

Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back*

*Kind of. Big chunks of this movie loosely adapt scenes from Jay & Silent Bob: Chasing Dogma, a comic book series by Kevin Smith and Duncan Fegredo, which took place between the events of Chasing Amy and Dogma. In it, Jay and Bob (and an ape named Suzanne) are mistaken for fugitives by a crazed U.S. Marshal who chases them throughout part of the story. 

They homaged this subplot in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, although it recast the very-obviously-Tommy Lee Jones character as Will Ferrell. You can see one of those scenes below (language, obviously, since it’s Kevin Smith):

Bulletproof Monk

…Look, we didn’t say they’d all be gold, okay?

30 Days of Night

Steve Niles’s vampire epic takes a simple, chilling concept: what if there was never daylight in which to hide from the vampires? This one spawned a sequel and a TV series, so audiences definitely connected with it…even if they had no idea it came from the comic shop.

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta (originally by Alan Moore and David Lloyd) might be the most easily identifiable movie on this list; not only was it pretty popular upon its release, but it has been pretty consistently a staple in the home video market since, often packaged by Warner Bros. along with another big title (sometimes Watchmen!). The movie centers on an amoral freedom fighter who trains (and tortures) a young girl to work with him to bring down a corrupt government.

Snowpiercer

Another near-future dystopia, and another one that actually inspired a TV show (this one is still running). Snowpiercer is “a post-apocalyptic ice age forces humanity’s last survivors aboard a globe-spanning supertrain. One man (Chris Evans) will risk everything to lead a revolt for control of the engine and the future of the world.”

Road to Perdition

This dark, period crime drama about a gangster and his son trying to outrun their destiny after the mob murders the rest of their family, featured the final live-action performance of cinema legend Paul Newman…and the first notable film performance by future Superman Tyler Hoechlin.

Based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Road to Perdition was the first film by director Sam Mendes following his Academy Award-winning breakout film American Beauty. Tom Hanks broke away from his usual nice guy role — but was never quite as dangerous or morally gray as his comics counterpart.

A History of Violence

Famous for being the last mass-market VHS tape produced by a major U.S. studio, this David Cronenberg favorite stars Viggo Mortenssen as an ex-mobster whose old life comes back to haunt him and the people he loves. It’s one of a pair of crime dramas that kick off this list, and in both cases they were nominated for a bunch of awards and got a pretty mainstream release, but there was almost no acknowledgment in their promotional materials that they were based on comics.

Of course, it’s debatable whether even the filmmakers knew that A History of Violence was based loosely on a graphic novel by John Wagner. It hardly came up when terminally-online MCU fans were beefing with Cronenberg over comments he made about superheroes.