5 Marvel Comics That Should Be TV Shows

The Punisher

I have come to the conclusion that an interesting Punisher movie cannot be made.  For when you boil the character down to its core parts, you have every action movie you have ever seen:  Man is happy.  Man is sad.  Man seeks vengeance.  But that doesn't mean Frank Castle is a weak character.  It just means he's not being used to his greatest potential.  What makes the Punisher comics great is not the single issues — it's the bigger picture those issues belong to.

Imagine someone taking the television show House and condensing it into a single, two hour movie.  It wouldn't work.  Because what makes House interesting is the incremental growth and change that his character goes through.  The medical mystery of the week can be entertaining, but it's his relationship with his team, his leg, and his "friends" that keep bringing us back for more.  That's what Frank Castle needs.  Context.

He needs twenty episodes to slowly tear apart a mafia family.  He needs a whole season to root out a drug cartel.  He needs reoccurring characters that show up to help him infiltrate something.  He needs villains that somehow slip through his fingers.

The wonderful thing about a Punisher television show is that it could be structured completely differently from season-to-season.  One season could be like a season of 24, where we focus on a very specific moment in his life.  Perhaps a very bad week he has.  Another season could be more akin to The Sopranos, or better yet, The Usual Suspects with the Punisher serving as a Keyser Soze-like angel of death that is slowly picking off this group of gangsters we're introduced to.  On the down side, it could also very easily become the next Walker Texas Ranger or Renegade.

Nice thing about it, too, is that it should be relatively cheap to make.  We're talking about a comic book with no super powers and no super-crazy Batmanesque supervillains.

Sphere: Related Content

<< PreviousNext >>

1 2 3 4 5