The Amazing Spider-Man is the most obvious example right now, rebooting a series which only came to an end four years ago, and since then has been kept in the public eye via DVD and Blu-Ray, TV series, video games and of course the comics themselves. A rant about how the Big Two of comics publishing are screwing up their own industry belongs elsewhere, so I'll stick to the films side of things here.
The Avengers film is the one bright spot, for me, on the cinematic horizon as far as comic book films go right now. There's a film which has been carefully planned and slowly built up in a hitherto unprecedented manner, via five feature films which have gradually created a coherent filmic universe for these characters. That's fine.
It's stuff like Spider-Man and X-Men which are doing my nut right now, as not only do these rebooted franchises ruin the original, established continuity of those properties, they also confuse the film-loving public with their slapdash approach to their own continuity. Are X-Men: First Class and X-Men Origins: Wolverine supposed to be part of the same universe? If so, how? If not, then not enough time has elapsed to set them apart.
Then there's the stuff from the DC stable, with The Dark Knight Rises coming across as a last-ditch attempt to chuck in some familiar villains to a series which is now just hitting its marks in this age of making everything gritty. Or The Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's misguided and doomed Superman movie. No matter how pretty the film ends up being, it's going to be ripped apart for its story, its direction and its pacing, as all of Snyder's films tend to be.
All of the classics of the comics industry have now been covered with various levels of success, with Watchmen and V For Vendetta coming out of it all quite well. However, then there's tosh like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (aka “LXG” ...cringe), the two Ghost Rider films, Green Lantern, Catwoman and so on. There's too much. These things aren't events any more. Is the bubble about to burst on comics-inspire films and other media? Possibly, but then again possibly not. There is a gargantuan amount of wonderful material out there for film adaptations, so why won't any studio take a chance or two and produce something new and exciting based on a property that isn't the same old capes and tights? Please?
