10 Great Movies You Didn’t Know Were Based on Comics

It’s no hot take to say that so much of today’s cinema landscape is governed by adapting other things, and most of those other things, if they’re not novels, turn out to be comics. The biggest comic book movies follow the biggest comic book publishers’ biggest superheroes on whatever cosmic adventures they go on every year, but these aren’t the only comic-based movies that film studios make.

It might seem like the only comic-based entertainment focuses on superheroes these days, but that’s only a part (albeit a large part) of what studios have adapted. For every Captain America sequel there’s a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or a V for Vendetta to show that the twin worlds of comic publishing and moviemaking focus on more than just capes and shields and laser eyes. Often, these adaptations are based on source material that’s already famous and beloved long before their movie versions come out. Sometimes, the movies become so well-known that we forget where the ideas originally came from.

Here, we’ve gathered a few cinema classics, some more beloved than others, but all based on characters and ideas that first manifested visually as comic strips or graphic novels. Whether it’s because the material was more obscure at the time or because the movies are so iconic now, the fact that they’re adaptations of a very different format has been forgotten, except by the most die-hard fans. Believe it or not, these are comic book movies, too.

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