Commentary: ‘Wanted’ Is The Best Comic-To-Film Adaptation

Adaptations are hard. This is just a fact of storytelling. But comic adaptations can be particularly tricky. This is simply because a lot of the storytelling developments that work in comics just do not work on the screen. Static images have a lot more leeway as far as what’s possible by stretching the imagination than seeing living actors on the screen do the same. Obviously, no adaptation works exactly as the source material. A lot needs to change, but it needs to accomplish this while also staying true to the source material and the themes it represents. In this regard, when both of these factors are taken into account, it’s quite possible that Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and James McAcoy, is the best comic-to-film adaptation there is.

The premise of the Wanted comic features a secret cabal of supervillains that run the world however they see fit. The story revolves around a guy who considers himself a loser with his life pretty much going nowhere. But things change for him dramatically when he finds out that his father was a super villain and he just inherited his legacy. The premise more or less stays the same for the film, except for one huge change that has drastic repercussions for the rest of the story. Instead of supervillains, the film uses a secret order of assassins.

Even though the change is a big one, the idea behind the story more or less remains intact. Having supervillains run around on screen wouldn’t have had the same impact as simply framing them as assassins. But the important thing to remember is that the overall theme survives. Wanted is about someone living a dull and mundane life, where people take advantage of him, and how he turns it all around. The main character takes control of his destiny and no longer lets others tell him what to do. Wanted is such a success as an adaptation because it completely rewrites a lot of the elements from the source material to fit the screen while also staying true to the heart of what that source material represents.

Wanted is now streaming on Netflix.