Why We Need a Kingdom Come Movie!

All right, I'm man enough to admit the fact that there's no way on earth any director could ever pull off a Kingdom Come film. I know they said that about "The Watchmen" and it would appear Zack Snyder managed to create at least a passable film version, but KC is a movie on an epic scale. While I understand the advances of green screen films like "300" and "The Spirit", I still don't see it happening.

But still...

So rather than dream cast this movie, I decided to bring out some of my favorite iconic scenes in the series to prove why we need to see this film in live action. The artwork of Alex Ross is about as close to live action as you could ever hope to see, and it's very easy to visualize real actors from his work.

So in no particular order....

This was never actually a scene in the book, though it was drawn by Ross as sort of an opener for the story. I love the way this looks.

The Spectre in this series was great, and his appearance in the church here really sets the stage for what's to come. Here is the avatar of God showing up in church to a minister who is about to have to judge the entire human race!

I could easily see this ending up as a movie poster or at the very least a teaser poster that has a simple street date at the bottom. Folks who knew the comic books would instantly know what's coming, while folks who didn't would think it was another horror flick. Their loss.

Of course, the super-powered battle that saw the death of Captain Atom and eventually the entirety of Kansas would be awesome if done correctly.

You can practically see the scene anyway. The shaky camera shots (ala "Cloverfield") and suddenly the bright explosion, followed by a far away shot of the mushroom cloud forming.

Two interesting notes here: first, DC actually used this scenario with the death of the first Firestorm character. Ronnie Raymond died this exact way (body torn open, but by a sword). The only difference is that he chose to fly far away to explode instead of doing it in the crowd.

The other note is that Marvel used this scenario to open the Civil War miniseries. The explosion wasn't big enough to take out a state, but it was this same setup.

And of course, there's no way on earth to miss my particular favorite moment from the story: the introduction of Red Robin!

Unfortunately, I have the feeling the movie folks would do what they usually do to a DC hero movie. They'd change his costume dramatically to give him more of a tough guy feel and completely mess up the character.

Still, since it's such a small part of the story, he might just be able to slip in there unscathed. It's doubtful though. Have you ever noticed how DC has a tendency to really change their characters for the films, while Marvel is (for the most part) true to the comics?

This beautiful splash scene comes as Batman leads his troops to save the day when Wonder Woman's crew is getting overwhelmed by the bad guys after they break out of the super prison. You can practically feel the lightning here!

And speaking of feeling the lightning...

This powerful shot brought us to the ultimate climax battle of the film. Superman had run pretty much unopposed throughout his clean up of the world. And then this moment came. We were treated to the first true appearance of Captain Marvel in the story (he'd been Billy Batson up until that point), and there was no doubt a smackdown was coming.

In truth though, we had no idea how badly Supes would be beaten. Captain Marvel used his magic lightning to take the Man of Steel on a pain ride that only stopped when Superman was finally able to get through the haze of Billy's mind and ask him to be the hero one last time. He then sped off and sacrificed his life to stop the nuclear bomb before it could kill all of the remaining heroes (it just killed most of them instead).

And imagine this incredible shot there at the end of the film:
Superman sits alone in a wasteland of superhero bones and screams to the wind just before taking off to destroy the U.N. building. You can see this shot pan out from Supes and just fly back further and further showing more bodies along the way. That, my friend, would be one of those "Lord of the Rings" battle shots that would take your breath away.

Truthfully, we'll probably never see this film, but I hope I've given you just a few reasons to understand what a tragedy that is.