Not-so-superhero movies

"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003)

On the page: The heroes of popular Victorian-era fiction assemble to fight off threats to the British crown.

How it turned out: You have to wonder what compelled Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill to let Hollywood try its hand at their highbrow pulp comic book sensation. Gone is Moore’s masterful twisting of the form, replaced by the most pedestrian of action-film clichés. The list of crimes includes a ludicrous car chase and the unnecessary grafting of an American character—Shane West’s Tom Sawyer—into Moore’s world of English fiction.