The Ultimate Marvel universe seems to cause quite a division among the comic book fan community. There are those who hate it with a passion and those like me who love at least some of it. This is like just about anything else in the comic book world. However, the thing that seems to polarize the fans the most is the influence of the Ultimate universe on Marvel movies. There really seems to be a strong belief among a section of the Marvel fan base that the Ultimate universe should have no influence whatsoever on the movies. In this article, I intend to argue why some Ultimate influence is both sensible and beneficial to translating .
To fully understand the situation, we need to answer this question: Why exactly do people hate the Ultimate universe in the first place? The answer is very simple: It's different. For some reason, a lot of people can't accept that. They view the Ultimate versions of their beloved characters as wrong. Now, if the Ultimate universe was meant as a replacement of the 616 universe, I could understand the hatred. But it's not! The Ultimate universe is a different take on familiar characters in a different world. I'll admit that I don't like everything about the Ultimate universe. For example, I really am not a fan of Ultimate Captain America's attitude and think that he's a poor distortion of the pure hearted Steve Rogers that I love. (I'm about to sort of go off on a tangent here, but go with me) Most people familiar with Ultimate Captain America know his famous line "Surrender??!! You think this letter on my head stands for France?"It's pretty amusing, but it serves to show just how different Ultimate Captain America is from the true Steve Rogers when you compare it to this excerpt from Ed Brubaker's Captain America #3.
"I've seen a lot of combat and I'd seen a lot before I got to France, but the savagery inflicted on these people...I never saw anything like it until we got to Buchenwald. That's why it galls me when I hear my own people dismissing the French as cowards. We're talking about a people who never gave up fighting the Nazi occupation. Their country may have surrendered but they didn't....So, we were proud to help them take back Paris. The victory parade came right up this way and up through the Champs-Elysees. My friends and I watched from the sidelines. It was their day, not ours. But I never forgot what they'd paid to get it which is probably why this has always been one of my favorite cities."
You can clearly see that these are two completely different men. Character differences like this are a major part of the reason why so many fans are anti-ultimate. However, it makes no sense to say that Ultimate Marvel ruins Captain America when the existence of the Ultimate interpretation has no affect on the classic Steve Rogers. Fans who don't like certain things in Ultimate Marvel can simply choose to ignore them and just read the series they like. (I read USM and pretty much ignore everything else in that universe) For some reason though, people seem to feel like Ultimate Marvel opposes classic so they channel the energy from their love for classic Marvel into hatred for Ultimate Marvel.
The problem is that people completely write off the Ultimate Marvel Universe and convince themselves that there is nothing worthwhile about it. This simply isn't true. I'll start my defense of Ultimate by taking a look at the series that started it all: Ultimate Spider-man. I could try to sum up the story behind this series, but this video does a fantastic job. So watch it. Now. Yeah, I'm talking to you, guy who was about to skip it. Watch it.
You skipped it, didn't you? Trouble-maker. Go back and watch it! (Sorry about that guys. Some people just can't follow directions!)
(The video doesn't mention how the popularity of USM grew to the point where it overtook the sales of Amazing Spider-man for a time) Anyway, as you can see, the goal of Ultimate Spider-man was simply to bring the origin of Spider-man into a modern context and do something fresh. There are changes to the story, definitely. But the bottom line is that it's the spirit of early Spider-man in the modern world. What does that sound like to you?
Exactly! So let's think about this. The new Spider-man movie is set during Peter Parker's high school years. With this movie they're going to try to modernize the early days of Spider-man, a time covered in the first few years of the Amazing Spider-man series. What should they look to for inspiration? I know! Maybe if there was a comic book series that was a modern re-imagining of the early years of the Amazing Spider-man they could partially base the movie on that. After all, this movie would be looking to achieve the same goal as this hypothetical series. Wait a second! There is a comic book series like that! A really good one! It's called Ultimate Spider-man! (oh the glory of typed sarcasm!)
You get the idea though. People are making it seem like by looking at Ultimate Spider-man, they're ignoring classic. If you take the time to think about it though, Bendis was looking at classic Spider-man when he started writing Ultimate Spider-man, so making a movie based partially on Ultimate Spider-man is pretty much making a movie that's a modernized version of classic Spider-man. That said, I don't want to see a straight adaptation of USM and I'm pretty sure they've already confirmed that it will be a mix. (Much like The Spectacular Spider-man animated series, widely accepted as the best Spider-man animated series to date)There are several things that they should take from Ultimate Spider-man such as the attention to character development, tone, and style while keeping their interpretation of characters like Green Goblin closer to their classic origins. An early, poorly worded quote mentioning how in USM, action took a back seat to teen angst made a lot of fans think that they were making the movie into some pre-teen drama in the vein of Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, or 90210. Anyone who has read USM can testify that this is not the case. The series focuses a lot on developing Peter as a character in and out of the costume. It really puts you into his life so you get to know Peter Parker. Relationships are important. Emotions are important. Because of this, the series has a great feel that I assure you any Spider-man film adaptation can benefit from. However, I'm not going to get too much into how the new Spider-man movie should be. That's another editorial for another time.
I would briefly like to touch on how well elements of Ultimate Spider-man would fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), if Marvel was hypothetically able to get the rights from Sony and tie Spider-man in with their other movie franchises.
The super soldier serum is very significant to the MCU. Obviously, it's crucial to the Captain America story because it is what transforms Steve into Captain America. It also plays an important role in the story of Bruce Banner. The government ,in the form of General Ross, wants Banner to re-create the super soldier serum (more or less). This is the experiment he's working on when he's transformed into the Hulk. The plot of the Incredible Hulk centers around the government wanting to capture Banner and make the Hulk into a weapon. Obviously, they're very interested in this super soldier concept. Interested enough that they could have more than one group working on making it a possibility.
This is an excerpt from Wikipedia's article on something from the Ultimate Spider-man story called Oz.
"OZ is a fictitious artificial mutagen responsible for the creation of the Ultimate Marvel Universe's Spider-Man, and many other characters. The OZ formula was created previous to Ultimate Spider-Man #1 by Norman Osborn, or, more precisely, OsCorp Industries. The formula was created to reproduce the Super Soldier drug for S.H.I.E.L.D., although it had yet to be perfected. Despite this, Norman Osborn was garnering much interest in OZ, while not revealing what it actually was. The company appeared to be prosperous, but was failing due to Osborn's hastily announcing the 'miracle drug OZ' without being able to release it due to its unfinished status. As of Ultimate Spider-Man #1 animal testing had begun, with the Spider No.00 showing 'interesting developments'. This same spider is misplaced as Osborn is distracted by a phone call."
As you probably guessed, this spider goes on to bite Peter Parker, turning him into Spider-man. Norman Osborn later uses OZ on himself, transforming into the Green Goblin. (this would explain Ultimate Goblin's similarity to the Hulk, but they really wouldn't have to do that version)Even the most stubborn of you must admit that this would be the perfect way to tie the Spider-man movies into the rest of the MCU. This directly links the origins of Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner and Peter Parker! But nothing good can come from Ultimate, so I guess it would be better to make it a "radioactive" spider, right? Anyway, Spider-man isn't part of the MCU so while this clearly shows some of the good ideas that could be used from Ultimate Marvel, I can't exactly end my argument here.
Let's talk about the biggest movie on every Marvel fan's mind: The Avengers. The fan community is loving this continuity and these connections that are going on in the movies of the MCU. There's Nick Fury's appearance at the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark's appearance at the end of the Incredible Hulk, the strong presence of SHIELD in the plot of Iron Man 2 and more . What do all of these have in common? They all have to do with SHIELD putting together the Avengers. Guess where this plot originated. Yep. Ultimate Marvel. The classic plot has these characters pretty much meeting by chance. Going that route, there was pretty much no potential at all to do the kind of build-up they've been doing. Don't forget that Ultimates also tied the discovery of Captain America into the founding of the Avengers. So for Avengers, we could have the Ultimate-inspired version Marvel is doing, or we could have the classic version in which Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Ant-man, and Wasp all come together by chance (notice once again that there is no Captain America in the classic origin). I'm in no way trying to say that the Ultimates is a better version of the Avengers, but elements from the plot of Ultimates definitely translate well when you're trying to build-up a Marvel movie universe and lead into the Avengers. With the Avengers I really think that they can keep the characters very close to their classic selves even while using a premise that is very Ultimate.
Now let's sum this all up. The Ultimate Marvel universe started out as a modern re-imagining of the early years of the Marvel Universe that was intended to be more accessible to people not as familiar with the classic continuity. It's different, but it doesn't intend to replace the regular Marvel Universe, so there's no real point in hating it. Many of its ideas are beneficial to those attempting to make movie adaptations of these characters because these movies have similar goals to the Ultimate Marvel series. While it's not a good idea to base a movie entirely on Ultimate, incorporating some of Ultimate's good ideas while staying true to the spirit of the classic Marvel universe characters is the way to go.
Please check out the video version of this article here. It's kind of the abridged version and you can just listen to it if you don't feel like reading everything.