'Game of Thrones' Author George R.R. Martin Has a Problem With Marvel's Villains
Long before George R.R. Martin became the author of the wildly successful Game of Thrones books, he was a Marvel Comics geek, digging into Stan Lee and co.’s creations from an early age. These days, when he’s not churning out thousand-page tomes about sadistic medieval monsters, Martin is watching his childhood heroes in their new big-screen incarnations. And he has strong opinions about them.
Martin has always been a fan of Ant-Man, so when he went to see the character’s movie debut earlier this week, he was skeptical. According to a new post on the writer’s blog, Martin was particularly concerned with the decision to focus the film on Scott Lang, the second Ant-Man, and not the comic’s original hero, Hank Pym. But he was largely won over by the film, which starred Paul Rudd and was directed by Peyton Reed, except for one important aspect: Yellowjacket, the evil scientist and traitor played by Cory Stoll.
“While Yellowjacket makes a decent villain here (in the comics, of course, he was actually one of Hank’s later identities, after Giant-Man and Goliath), I am tired of this Marvel movie trope where the bad guy has the same powers as the hero,” he wrote. “The Hulk fought the Abomination, who is just a bad Hulk. Spider-Man fights Venom, who is just a bad Spider-Man. Iron Man fights Ironmonger, a bad Iron Man. Yawn. I want more films where the hero and the villain have wildly different powers. That makes the action much more interesting).”
Many people have commented on the Marvel films’ weak-sauce villain problem, which perhaps stems from the fact that every Marvel movie is, in some ways, just a bridge to another Marvel movie. Marvel is still sitting pretty — Ant-Man opened to nearly $60 million and was its latest box office champion — but they might want to take some advice from the guy who’s created a book and TV show populated by almost exclusively awful villains.
