Changing comic and book characters

I’ve always been a purist when it came to comic book characters in film. What I mean by purist is that I preferred that the actor who plays a specific comic book character resembles the character in every form. Race, hair color, eyes, mannerism and so on.

Queen of the damned is a perfect example of a movie totally ruining, in that case, a phenomenal book. In fairness, I enjoyed the movie, but they could have called it, “Ancient Vampires be Tripping” or something and left the Anne Rice aspect out altogether.

I hate how they butchered the story line and characters, down to their hair color and mannerisms. Marius? Armand? Those men are supposed to be absolutely beautiful, and they looked a certain way. Hello! Marius made Lestat into a vampire? Get the hell out of here!

When the comic book movies started switching up characters, my reaction was the same. I was unhappy and irritated because I want to see the comics come to life as they were meant to be by their creators.

A perfect example is Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

When Samuel L. Jackson was cast to play Nick Fury, I was initially against it because he doesn’t look anything like the Nick Fury of the comics. However, he did such a great job in the role that I actually forgot how the original Nick Fury looks and associated the character with SLJ. After seeing this phenomenon happen, I stopped caring if they cast people who were actual clones of the characters and was more focused on how they did the job.

I’ve even become a bit more flexible on accepting changing story lines, but you can’t be having major deviations like “Marius made Lestat.” That breaks the whole damn story line.

My most recent reaction along these lines was when they cast Robert Pattinson to be Batman. He’s of small build, Twilight, and in my mind was not a good choice to play an iconic character like Batman. However, watching that trailer changed my mind. He appears worthy and I do hope he knocks it out the park!

How do you feel about movies changing up characters from books and comics?