Marvel has some magnificent stories in its decades of comics. Some work best as smaller stories for Marvel’s street level characters on Netflix. Others, like the excellent Brood Saga from the pages of X-Men won’t make the list because Fox owns the rights to those Marvel characters and IP lawyers are a persnickety bunch.
That still leaves hundreds of great stories that work well on the big screen as part of the Marvel MCU movies. We curate the top 7.
7 Marvel Stories that Would Make for a Great Movie
Kraven’s Last Hunt Sony previously had the movie rights to Spider-Man and made about twelve million mostly mediocre Spider-Man movies. But Sony never touched the character Kraven, which leaves that door wide open for Marvel to make a Tom Holland Spider-Man movie with Kraven as the primary villain.
Kraven’s Last Hunt is an iconic Spider-Man story that would provide for an almost noir take for the hero. We’ve written about Kraven’s Last Hunt before, so I’ll send you there. But rest assured, it would make for a great movie.
Sinister Six The Sinister Six is a villainous group the the Sony Spider-Man movies were leading to before Marvel got the rights back. And Spider-Man Homecoming teased a larger cast of villains than just the Vulture.
The Sinister Six is intriguing because it is a story that brought a half dozen of Spidey’s foes to team up against him. It’s risky because it’s hard to balance that many characters in a film. But Marvel has shown that they can juggle lots of characters well and fans would really like to see the Sinister Six properly on screen.
Spider-Verse We’re keeping with Spider-Man because not only is he one of the most popular comic characters ever, but us fans are still excited that Marvel has him back and integrated into the MCU.
If Marvel wants to really let Spider-Man enter into the crazy realm of multiple universe spanning stories, they’ll use the Spider-Verse storyline, one of Spider-Man’s best recent tales.
Spider-Verse brought together multiple versions of Spider-Man in order to battle against the ultimate foe. It was great and would allow Marvel to seamlessly introduce Spider-Man characters like Miles Morales or even newer faces like Silk or Spider-Gwen, setting up Phase Four of the MCU.
Kang Dynasty This list isn’t just Spider-Man stories. Let’s talk Avengers as well.
Kang the Conqueror is an iconic Avengers villain who travels through time. While time travel is always a whacky undertaking on screen, there is do doubt that Kang would provide a great villain for upcoming Avengers movies.
Although Kang has appeared in decades of Avengers comics, the early 00s story written by Kurt Busiek would be a great tale for a Marvel movie.
Thor: The Goddess of Thunder Although Thor Ragnarok is the latest Thor movie on the Marvel MCU schedule, there are still Thor stories to tell.
The recent Jason Aaron run on Thor starts with a heavy metal guitar solo in the form of the God Butcher storyline. It may be a difficult pivot since the latest Thor movie has a comedic buddy cop tone, but that story leads into one where Thor is considered unworthy and another takes up the mantle of Thor.
That sets off the Goddess of Thunder storyline which is absolutely amazing and would allow a new Thor to grace the screen (even though it would be sad to see Chris Helmsworth leave the role, he can’t stay in it forever).
Secret Invasion This was a rare Marvel crossover that was actually enjoyable, but there were great Skrull stories even before this.
Skrulls are an alien race in the Marvel universe that are shapeshifters that can perfectly mimic a human. Skrulls infiltrated the Marvel Universe by taking over the lives of many of Marvel’s greatest heroes. The idea: what if your enemies lived among you?
Skrulls have already been teased for the upcoming Captain Marvel movie which would be amazing. The wealth of new possibilities they’d open up could write many of the upcoming stories for the next ten years of marvel movies.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Annihilation The Guardians of the Galaxy were D list characters when Marvel brought them to the big screen, but they weren’t much more popular in the comics.
The exception to this was the fantastic Annihilation storyline that was a part of Dan Abnett’s run on GotG. (We fully wrote up that fantastic comics run.)
The Annihilation storyline would be big, epic, and include a whole host of characters in a way that would work as a 2.5 hour movie.
Listen, we have no idea what Marvel will do for Phase 4 of the MCU (although that didn’t stop us from speculating), or even how they’ll finish out Phase 3. But any of the above storylines would offer great potential if they were ripped from the comics and put on the big screen.
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