Comic books are all the rage in the movie industry, but they don’t always have the right man or woman behind the mask. Some people are lucky they don’t read comics. They do not suffer when 30 years of waiting ends in disappointment. For the purists it’s never that simple. One poor casting job can blind them to any positives, and the following actors did not merely betray the franchise, they were doomed from the start.
Source: Warner Bros.
10. Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool (Wade Wilson) in X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Source: 20th Century Fox
I like to think they gave Deadpool his name because it’s easy to imagine him standing knee deep in a flood of corpses, all sliced in half and with bullets in their brains. Now, is that the extreme guy you think of when you look at Ryan Reynolds? Is he the type of cold-blooded assassin who leaves his blades behind when he raises the roof off a sorority house after faking an engagement to Sandra Bullock? Reynolds might have something to offer the comic book universe. Maybe as Flash, or even Havok, but for the sake of all that’s good and Marvel not Deadpool.
9. Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) in Watchmen
Source: Warner Bros.
There is nothing coy or James Bond about Veidt, which is what Goode mysteriously brought to the character. Fans noticed immediately when the first in-costume still was released. It’s not mostly Goode’s fault, he didn’t have the look or the build to fit the massive mind and physique of the super-hero tycoon. Veigt was insanely toned mentally and physically. Goode was plain soft, and cocky in a bad way. It was Veigt’s demeanor what made his ultimate decision so shocking. He wasn’t really hiding anything. He was the same person on every page. Ozymandias did his deed for the better good. It felt like Goode was just having a good time.
8. Cillian Murphy as The Scarecrow (Jonathan Crane) in Batman Begins
Source: Warner Bros.
Scarecrow was a smart villain to work into Batman’s origin story, but Cillian Murphy was a puzzling choice to play the disturbed Jonathan Crane. We can forget the designers turning what could have been a fantastically terrifying costume into a 99-cent-store Halloween mask, but Murphy added a sense of style and sultriness that could not have been farther from the source material. In fact, it was Crane’s inability to deal with commonplace social interactions that led to his obsession with controlling people’s emotions: most specifically fear. He was a frazzled lunatic. Christopher Nolan transformed him into some bio-terrorist Hugh Hefner.
7. Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson in Spider-man
Source: Sony Pictures Entertainment
We’ve seen the fashionably frumpy Dunst play the seductive girl next door, so it wasn’t a stretch for an acting assignment at first. After weighing two movies worth of whining, we had a hard time rooting for Spider-Man to save her in part three. Spidey wore the tights, but with her performance, she made sure she wore the pants. Dunst confused “spunky” for “airhead,” did her best acting when she was screaming, and even blew the lid off plot details months before the producers intended.
6. Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane in Superman Returns
Source: Warner Bros.
Casting Bosworth as Lane is like casting Posh Spice as Professor McGonagall in the next Harry Potter movie. Then you drive the stake deeper by telling the fans she’s continuing the role from the previous films like nothing happened. Age aside, Bosworth still doesn’t come close to portraying the feisty Metropolis reporter. There’s a reason Lane worked herself to the top of a mostly male-driven industry at the time of Superman’s first publishing. She had a take-no-prisoners style of reporting, justifying her attendance of nearly every traumatic event in Metropolis. Going from Margot Kidder to Kate Bosworth may be easy on the eyes, but you don’t need x-ray vision to see she doesn’t fit.
