Rann:  Den of Geek has a short rundown of 75 upcoming comic book movies, ranging from the never-heard-of-it-unless-you’re-hardcore-into-indie-comics, to the mainstream, to the “okay I guess it’s technically a comic”.

I’ll just hit on a couple of them:

Runaways
Enh. I read the first volume of the comic, and found it pretty good, but also with a lot of kind of annoying bits to it. The series drips teen angst and uses “adults are evil morons” as a consistent theme, which comes off as rather silly in a day and age where the majority of these kids would consider themselves adults and be demanding to be viewed and treated as such. One of them’s even over eighteen, and they had him saying adults sucked. Chances of that being taken up a notch to a level somewhere around “intolerable” are high.

Thulsa Doom
A spinoff of Conan’s iconic villain from the first movie, and probably the source for the “the villain turns into a giant snake” cliche. I’m guessing they’re going to give him some sort of Scorpion King treatment where he started off as a hero and by the time he shows up in the first Conan movie he’s rather inexplicably turned into an asshole.

I mean, I liked The Scorpion King, it was pretty much exactly how a Conan movie should be made in modern-day. The problem was that they made him such a cool hero (and why wouldn’t they?) that his face-heel turn between then and his campaign of blood and terror as seen in the second Mummy movie just didn’t make much sense. You’re going to run into the same thing here. What if it takes off and becomes a big success? You’re stuck with a popular hero who everyone realizes is going to become a bastard who kills entire villages just to get better steel and then a creepy flower-child cult leader. Hellooooo sucky straight-to-video even-further-back-prequel.

Ghost In The Shell
A live action version of the cyberpunk manga/anime, directed by Ari Aradd. Soooo chances are that either like the dead dull sequel movie or much of season two of Stand Alone Complex, this movie will have an utterly ridiculous amount of navel-gazing due to Aradd’s influence. Or it will wind up as a fairly lobotomized version of itself to transform it into a more typical action movie along the lines of Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux, and there won’t be ENOUGH navel-gazing. Chances of hitting the correct proportion of action-to-contemplating-one’s-bellybutton that the first season of SAC had are probably almost nil.

Red Sonja
It’s looking like this impending piece of (likely) crap, already much maligned on this blog, has already stunk enough to make some of the studio suits start sniffing. Rumors are it will go straight to disc. That’s some Uwe Boll level of bad, there.

Akira
... Leonardo disappointed WHO when he said he wouldn’t be in this? I’m… what? Out of all the anime/manga to try and adapt with a Western sensibility, they picked this one? I’m pretty certain that shit doesn’t even make sense to Japanese people, it was just sufficiently epic and weird that a lot of people took notice of it.

Silver Surfer
Looks like the massive amount of shit that “Rise” sucked is holding this one up. Shame. I’ve always liked the Surfer, silly as he is, he used to be my favorite Marvel character when I was a kid and thought surfboards were one of the coolest things in existence. Seeing him get a movie by a director whose greatest accomplishment wasn’t a movie about a supercharged taxi cab would have been, well, awesome.

Spider-Man 4
Yeah, I know, everybody hated the third one. I didn’t think it was that bad, but I also didn’t think it was that good, either. But now that Raimi has hopefully gotten his stupid Sandman fixation out of the way, we might get a villain that’s actually, you know, been popular and in circulation in the last decade or so. (Or three.)