Superhero Spin-offs

With the film news community reporting that Marvel are planning to do a spin-off of Iron Man featuring James Rhodes as War Machine, we had a look at some of the great and not so great superhero spin-offs and sequels we’ve seen in the past:

X-men Origins: Wolverine
This was a highly successful spin-off of the X-men trilogy of films focusing on the extremely popular character of Wolverine. There is a lot of chatter in the film news arena about the future spin-off Deadpool movie. There is also lots of talk about the Wolverine getting its own sequel, set in Japan and focused on Wolverine’s time at a key period in his life. The final scenes of the first Wolverine movie act as great teaser film trailer for the second movie. The movie would be based on the Claremont-Miller series which star Hugh Jackman has already said was his favourite

Elektra
Elektra was released in 2005 as a spin-off of the Daredevil movie of two years before that. The film was featured in many film news publications for being the lowest earning movie featuring a Marvel character since Howard the Duck. The film was initially intended to include Daredevil, although he was cut in the final film version. There were many comic fans that felt the film suffered because it strayed too far from the original material since Frank Miller was only credited for the characters rather than the story

Evan Almighty
(While not specifically a superhero film the fact that the protagonist is a prophet is pretty super so we’re including it in this list)
This film was released as a sequel and spin-off of Bruce Almighty with the lead role changing from Jim Carrey to Steve Carrell. The scope of the movie was also massively different with the second film being seen as an epic with a fairly simplistic message about spirituality. The film generally scored poorly in critics ratings, even with it having an epic sized budget. The film trailer was first screened alongside another Carrell project, The Office, presumably to increase association.

The Chronicles of Riddick
The Chronicles of Riddick was created as a spinoff of Pitch black, which both starred Vin Diesel in the role of Riddick. There are 3 versions of the film which include different sub-plots as well as different endings. Even though the reception for the film was lukewarm, Vin Diesel has consistently insisted that there are two sequels to come. Film news earlier this year showed that he was working on pre-production and that one of the locations they plan to use is the White Desert in Egypt.