08 Real Life Superhero

You’ve seen him, but I can’t wait to start featuring him more. Hint: It’s on Tuesday. 🙂

As for the question you asked, any superhero without powers would be pretty easy to transfer realistically on-screen, so it’d be sort of boring to try to make that transition to realistic fun. Looking at the Marvel heroes, well, they’ve already done realistic takes on them (there was a mini-series called “Powerless” that featured many of its major characters in a more mundane universe, and the Ultimate universe was supposed to be a more down-to-Earth take on things) so seeing them wouldn’t be that much fun, either. There’d be no real challenge for the filmmakers, and with very few concessions, pretty much any Marvel hero could be done justice in some way.

DC Comics, on the other hand, has never had much success. Well, no, they’ve had plenty of success with putting their characters in realistic situations, but it’s more fiscal than creative. I mean, look at “Smallville”. It was dreck, but dreck that managed to stay on the air for ten years. Superman, then, is out. Between “Smallville” and “Man of Steel”, we don’t need to see a realistic take on him. I don’t want to. Batman is also out, for pretty much the same reason. Aquaman might be fun, though that’s mainly because I have an affection for the character, but any movie adaption of Aquaman is inherently doomed to failure due to the mainstream audience dismissing it out-of-hand. He’s still the butt of too many jokes. Green Arrow has “Arrow”, which has a few issues but is off to a much better start than “Smallville” ever was, and it’s keeping things simple. Heck, the Flash had his own series, too, and it was less fantastical and more grounded. Wonder Woman did, too, though I’ve never seen her show. I’m assuming they skimped on things like gorillas who were turned into ladies who could grow and women in cheetah costumes.

I think the best bet to go with any of this would be to choose a lesser known hero from either universe, but one who’s still interesting enough to maybe carry a movie that could be deemed “realistic” and still get the character across. For Marvel, I would suggest Squirrel Girl. She has some squirrel-based powers, yeah, but she’s mostly known for beating everyone in the Marvel Universe. That’s just sheer fighting talent, so just have her backstory have lots of training. Basically go the Batman route, but with squirrels and fun instead of bats and grimness, and have her fight some of the Marvel villains who aren’t too fantastic but still powerful. For DC, I think I’d go with Animal Man. He’d be a bit harder to pull off, as one of his things is drawing on the power of animals, but that could be written off as some sort of pheromone-based thing.