Marvel has been telling amazing stories for years and with the success of superhero cinema, more fans than ever can experience the stories that only comic fans knew about for years. This has led to Marvel becoming even more of a cultural force than they already were, with the MCU becoming a pop-culture juggernaut, a shared universe that each movie subtly changed, just like the comics before them.
However, there are plenty of times when these adaptations, whether they be in the MCU or otherwise, missed the point of the stories they brought to the big screen. Some are panned, some are beloved, but they all missed the point.
10 Captain Marvel Didn't Understand "The Kree-Skrull War" At All
Captain Marvel is a better movie than its detractors suggest, and while it doesn't adapt any one story, it takes a lot of the cues for its background from the classic Avengers tale, "The Kree-Skrull War." It used the war as the backdrop for the whole thing and pushes the narrative that the Kree were evil. However, that has nothing to do with the comic story.
In that story, both the Kree and Skrull were equally bad and out to use and abuse humanity for their own purposes. Both sides were fighting each other because they had reached evolutionary equilibrium and wanted to use humanity--not just because the Kree were genocidal. In fact, in the comics, the Kree are way less genocidal than the Skrull in general.
9 Avengers: Age Of Ultron Completely Messed Up Ultron
Avengers: Age Of Ultron is another movie that took from many sources and while it messed up in several places, one of the biggest things it missed the point on was Ultron. Read any comic story with Ultron in it and one would see that Ultron isn't some strangely charming being who makes sarcastic jokes. He's a frightening genocidal monster, and he isn't going to quip with the Avengers.
Ultron represents the implacable nature of evil and technology running amok, but the movie version was pretty much metal MCU Loki. The movie took a classic character and missed the point of every story he was in.
8 Avengers: Infinity War Missed The Point Of Thanos's Nihilism To Shoot For Faux Profundity
Avengers: Infinity War adapted Infinity Gauntlet, one of Marvel's greatest event books. It wasn't at all comic accurate, which was alright, but one place where it missed the point was with Thanos's motivation. In the movie, they changed it to him wanting to kill half the universe to conserve resources, which is sort of ridiculous and made Thanos look rather unintelligent while grasping for faux profundity.
In the comics, Thanos was motivated by his love of Mistress Death, which seems simplistic on the surface but is actually a metaphor for Thanos's nihilism. Beyond that, Thanos's nihilism made him subconsciously believe that he wasn't worthy of the power he sought out, making his defeat inevitable. At its core, Infinity Gauntlet is a refutation of nihilism, while Avengers: Infinity War is a cool action movie.
7 WandaVision Doesn't Go As Far As Avengers Disassembled To Show How Trauma Affected Wanda
WandaVision did a lot of the same things that Avengers Disassembled did, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Both stories are about how trauma can adversely affect a person but WandaVision is much tamer than Avengers Disassembled. In that story, Scarlet Witch kills several Avengers and almost destroys the team because of the events of her life having broken her.
In WandaVision, Scarlet Witch controls some minds for the same reason but that's different from killing her friends. Wanda as a character has to be redeemable for MCU audiences, and seeing her kill Avengers because of her trauma would be a lot to take in.
6 X2: X-Men United Misses The Point Of God Loves, Man Kills
X2: X-Men United is one of the better of Fox's X-Men movies but it still is not a very good adaptation. The movie uses some of the trappings of the X-Men classic God Loves, Man Kills but makes a huge change, one which completely misses the point of that classic story. By changing Stryker to a general from a church leader, it destroys the subtext of its source material.
The whole point of God Loves, Man Kills is that people use religion as an instrument of oppression. The movie, however, changed Stryker to a military officer, which completely misses the point.
5 Spider-Man 3 Made Sandman One Of Uncle Ben's Killers
Spider-Man 3 is the movie that killed Sony's first round of Spider-Man movies. While there are many reasons for this, one of the biggest is making Sandman one of Uncle Ben's killers. It's just a weird change, one that sort of misses the entire point of Amazing Fantasy #15.
Ben's death wasn't important because of who did it but what it represented--Peter disregarding his uncle's teachings. Spider-Man 3 took this and tried to put a face on it for cheap emotional resonance instead of the actual resonance the event has. It welded a lackluster revenge subplot onto the whole thing that wasn't needed.
4 X-Men Origins: Wolverine Misses The Entire Point Of Every Deadpool Story
With how poorly X-Men Origins: Wolverine was received, it's surprising Wolverine ever got another solo movie. The movie has so many things about it that aren't up to par and everyone knows the worst--Deadpool. They certainly missed the point with all of the Deadpool content.
Deadpool wasn't meant to be some silent monster villain but a motormouthed merc, one with a tragic backstory that made the whole thing that much more poignant.
3 Thor: Ragnarok Misused Planet Hulk
Thor: Ragnarok is the best Thor movie by a longshot. It used elements of Thor and Hulk stories for its narrative trappings, including the Hulk classic Planet Hulk. The problem is that it ignores everything about that story except the gladiatorial trappings.
Planet Hulk sees the Hulk do something he had never done before--build a coalition and become a great leader who is able to free a planet from tyrannical dictatorship and bring it together before tragedy strikes. It showed the Hulk in a light he had rarely been seen in, while Thor: Ragnarok just made him talk more.
2 X-Men: The Last Stand Does Not Understand "The Dark Phoenix Saga" In The Slightest
"The Dark Phoenix Saga" is one of the greatest X-Men stories of all time, and it's always been butchered when adapted for the big screen. While both X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Dark Phoenix are lackluster, X-Men: The Last Stand was on a different level. It reduces "The Dark Phoenix Saga" to a shallow power corrupts arc, which is only part of what the original story is about.
In fact, "The Dark Phoenix Saga" is barely about that--Phoenix falls not because she can't handle her power but because of mental manipulations. The story is more about how far people will go to save someone they love, which X-Men: The Last Stand barely gets into.
1 Captain America: Civil War Ignores Everything About Civil War Except The Fight Between Superheroes
Captain America: Civil War fundamentally misunderstands everything about its seminal source material. The point of the comic wasn't to just have the heroes fight or show that they could be manipulated into fighting by a smart enough villain. Civil War was all about the battle of freedom versus security and how both sides missed the point of what being a hero is about, even though Iron Man and his side were much worse off than Captain America's.
The movie brought in Zemo as a villain for audiences to hate, made Cap look like he was in the wrong for defending his friend, and went out of its way to justify Iron Man and made him into the good guy of the whole thing. They took a smart superhero story and made it into an efficient action scene generator.