The villain in Dooms story would, if done correctly, he Doom himself.
The villain in Dooms story would, if done correctly, he Doom himself.
In terms of him being his own worst enemy and becoming as bad as the things he fights and so on, yeah. But you still need something logical to drive Doom there.
If you look at the Godfather movies...sure Michael Corleone ultimately becomes a monster and a mass-murderer but we understand what put him there and we accept that some of the people who come after him (Solozzo, Barzini, Tattaglia, Hyman Roth) are even worse than him, and they attack him first. The same with his father Vito...he was a poor peasant who lost his mother (and his father before that) to an evil Sicilian landowner and is marked for death as an orphan. In the new world he faces the same oppression, so you understand even if you do not condone, why he became who he became and does the stuff that he does.
With Doom you need to take him a similar path.
I mean making a movie around a villain isn't a new thing. We've had The Godfather, Scarface, in theater we have MacBeth and Richard III which have been adapted for film.
Well Doom is better than sugar daddy sleazy trashbag Magneto who should never be allowed near any girls after he seduced Rogue and was on the verge of doing the same to his daughter what with making her dance to entertain him and similar shit.
I don't think Doom is to blame for what happened to his mother and for being oppressed.
He's to blame for that rash accident that got him scarred even if his motivations for doing so (rescuing his mother's soul) was sound. He's to blame for obsessing over Richards and for establishing a tyranny after his revolution.
But everything before that, and aside from that, you're on his side. Whether it's him against the Baron, Mephisto, the Beyonder, HYDRA...Doom on that day, is who you are rooting for. The fact is you need to establish logical reasons why some heroes will sometimes team up with Doom (as Strange does), why Doom would be capable of delivering the child of his sworn enemy, why a good part of the people of Latveria love and support him despite being a tyrant (and no they're not all brainwashed just like most people in Caesar's Rome, Napoleon's France, Putin's Russia or Stalin's USSR weren't brainwashed...but backing their ruler with eyes open).
I have to admit although I have seen Scarface, and I mean both Al Pacino's and Paul Muni's when I was going back over the old gangster movies like Cagney's Roaring Twenties and White Heat I keep saying one of these days with Godfather
That does make an interesting set of templates ...Richard III and Vito Corleone. The latter's story make one wonder how many true stories like that are out there. I've said in the other discussions how I feel that a lot of Doom's origin is more Jack than Stan. Kirby was in the infantry in WWII and went through parts of Europe while an advance scout for out of Patton's units. He described coming across a stockade like structure were half starved locals where penned up as slave labor for the Nazis. He never says so but one wonders if there were Jews and Romani among that group. His grandmother was the storyteller of the family and he may have got some other accounts from her. Kirby was first generation American IIRC and the rest of his family immigrated in the early part of the 1900s.
In any film adaptation of Doom's origin, we would have to assume that it will not take place in the past of the MU as it stood in when Stan and Jack put it together unless time travel is involved. But there has been a lot of turmoil in Europe and recent events can be tapped into. The Romani are still not welcome and the Italian government wants to expel any non-indigenou Roma after they are done with a census. There is no Romani homeland. That could be an interesting subplot if you want to show Doom starting out as a revolutionary trying to put together a homeland for his people. I sure am curious about Noah Hawley's Doom script because the seems to have hinted about something along these lines.
Well then you have a great movie to see for the first time then, right. The Godfather movie was revolutionary in that this was the first time you had a major American mainstream movie that had the audience identify with a gangster who never gets caught or punished by the law. That never happened before. Godfather was the biggest American movie of its day, biggest since Gone With the Wind...and hey say what you want about Michael Corleone, unlike Scarlett O'Hara he never owned slaves.
In the case of Vito Corleone it's certainly true that Sicilians left the Island because the region was oppressive and that many Italian Americans coming to America faced oppression and discrimination and were even victims of a lynch mob (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_...eans_lynchings). It's been stated the american mafia originated as self-defense leagues that gradually became corrupt and criminal over time. Similar thing happened with the Irish American mob as seen in Gangs of New York.That does make an interesting set of templates ...Richard III and Vito Corleone. The latter's story make one wonder how many true stories like that are out there.
In real history, it's not uncommon for people who are oppressed by tyranny to become dictators. Julius Caesar as a young man was hounded by the dictator Sulla who drove away his family and friends and tried to force him to divorce his first wife...Caesar refused and fled Rome only for Sulla's goons to bring him back and almost certainly killing him, until his mother intervened for him. Fidel Castro likewise was a lawyer who protested the human rights record of the Batista regime and even got imprisoned for his activism. Both of them ultimately became the thing they once opposed.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a Corsican who spoke French with an Italian accent and he came from a backwater island whose many attempts at independence failed. He got to go to a French academy on an affirmative action program for minor Corsican nobles and he was mocked and insulted for his accent and for being a backward hillbilly. When the French Revolution happened, he showed great loyalty to France at a low moment and risked everything in support of it, only for political associations to land him in hot water. I think Doom is similar to Napoleon more than anyone since both Caesar and Castro came from elite families whereas Napoleon sure was nobility in Corsica but even there wasn't big cheese and he was less than that in terms of France as a whole. Without the French Revolution, Napoleon would have been a nobody.
I actually think Doom's story has never been more contemporary. You can put him in the Balkans and allude to the crisis in the 90s, which is still fresh in everyone's minds, you can also make him a kind of Post-War European populist nationalist of some sort. And of course him being Romani adds a wrinkle since Doom can talk about the oppression of his people with some truth...But there has been a lot of turmoil in Europe and recent events can be tapped into.
Yeah.
The concept of doing a story from a villain's perspective isn't new at all. It's common in theater (Shakespeare plays) literature (novels like Crime and Punishment), movies, TV show (Sopranos, Breaking Bad), even video games (God of War/Grand Theft Auto/Spec Ops the Line).
It's just that it's not been done with established comics supervillains. And if it were to be done, it's natural for film-makers to take references from outside genres because they're doing something rare and entering a space where other mediums have been ahead of them on that front. Joker 2019 is based on Taxi Driver and King of Comedy because they provide references on how to explore the viewpoint of insane narcissistic sociopaths who delude themselves into being what they are not. If you were to Doom then Vader would be a reference, as would Michael Corleone and other stories. Lucas really tested the limits as to getting the audience to identify with a repulsive person. Even in the comics Victor von Doom never did anything as vile as Anakin did when he massacred those kids in the Jedi school.
You want to do a villain based character study where he goes full God Status within the arc? That's closer to Lucy than the Joker movie, and by the time the hundreds of millions in special effects were done playing out during his ascension so no one left interested in a character study would still be in the seats.
I think you're confusing the question: what would be a good in a Joker-style movie ... not who would be the next massive villain for the MCU's next 10 years. Those are dramatically different things. Want to make the case for the MCU? Thats fine. I could see Doom fill Thanos' shoes. Not the topic.
Adam West had more character than any of them ... so I find this block a hilarious statement. Heck most movie reviews agree Lego-Batman did more to push the character forward than anything has bothered before it. That says a lot more than "but this video game did a lot". Sorry, no. Every superhero has a problem with being stuck in a trope ... Batman's is that he's little more than a pair of pants for the reader to put on for awhile.That's true until a certain point. It's true for the Adam West show and the Burton Batman movies, but I doubt if that's true for the Bruce Timm animated series, for the Nolan movies, and the Arkham games. Batman was a generic character in the comics for a lot of the time but in the 70s, Englehart and others developed his character and added more human elements. Frank Miller likewise gave Batman a tragic focus (he's so driven that he will end up alienating everyone around him) and since then Batman became a more complex and tragic character.
At some point IMDB pay-walled this data behind IMDBPro, but if that's true cool. No, Pfeiffer didn't make close to Keaton ($10m vs $3), ladies never did back then. Devito I believe did, however (quick google didn't answer and I cant be bothered for a huge in-depth search atm ... btw quick google also claims Ledger made more than Bale 20 vs 15 ... but that seems odd to me so I'll trust your call).Only the Burton movies did that (and even then I doubt that Michelle Pfeiffer was paid more than Keaton for Batman Returns) but the Christopher Nolan movies gave Bale top billing.
Id still argue the villain drives Batman's tickets beyond anything else. Come at me bro.
Less realistic ... but you want to go full "man becomes god" arc as the _more_ grounded route? This reads more bitter than rational. Sorry ... a Doom movie would blow. He's nothing more than generic villain foil.In other words it would basically be a Godfather ripoff except even less realistic in portrayal of crime. Kingpin can never carry a movie by himself. He's been played well by Michael Clarke Duncan and definitively by Vincent D'Onofrio and both of them are character actors primarily. And both actors only get certain parts right. Duncan gets the physicality of Kingpin and him being a great fighter, while D'Onofrio gets the arch-manipulator.
Oh, and I admit Kingpin would also be poor ... but I kind of said that in the initial post too, so <shrug>.
Well in a trilogy certainly. Doom Part I. He takes over Latveria. Doom Part 2. He frees his mother's soul. Doom Part 3, he becomes God.
I actually don't disagree with this.Id still argue the villain drives Batman's tickets beyond anything else. Come at me bro.
I do think that Batman's appeal is fundamentally his relationship with his rogues. And certainly Batman's movies with Joker (Nicholson in 89, Ledger's Dark Knight) do make more money than the ones without him. And now Joker 2019 is proving to be more profitable (in terms of profit margin i.e. low budget/high profits) than the Snyder movies with Affleck (which had no Joker).