The Most Obscure Comic Book Heroes to Get Movies

Before Clayface got his own 2026 movie from DC Studios, he had headlined exactly zero (0) monthly comic series. Sure, he’s gotten a handful of one-shots through the years, and he’s antagonized Batman in a rightfully beloved Batman: The Animated Series episode. But as superheroes (or villains) go, he’s among the most obscure to ever receive his own big-screen movie.

Among the most … but through the years, both DC and their competitors at Marvel have produced some very big movies based on some very minor properties. Today, let’s look at 12 of the most notable examples.

(Keep in mind: These are obscure superhero movies from just the Marvel and DC libraries. If I expanded the list to include Dark Horse, Image, Oni, or smaller indie publishers, there are even more arcane films I could have cited. Where are my R.I.P.D. fans at???)

Big Hero 6 (2014)

I’m going to guess most people who saw Big Hero 6 in theaters had no idea that the characters originated in a Marvel comic — one that starred a former X-Man, no less. The team debuted in the 1998 book Sunfire & Big Hero 6. Most of the characters who wound up in the Disney animated movie did appear in that comic, although some in drastically different forms; Baymax, for example, looked more like a muscly dragon than a sentient body pillow. Maybe that explains why Marvel has only used Big Hero 6 sparingly in the years since Big Hero 6 became a big-screen hit for Disney, spawning an animated TV spinoff and amusement park attractions — but very few comic-book sequels.

Congo Bill (1948)

The earliest years of comic-book movies were odd. Big characters like Captain America and Captain Marvel (now Shazam) got their own film serials, but a bunch of lesser-known heroes starred in their own movies as well. That includes Congo Bill, a jungle adventurer with a serial distributed by Columbia Pictures. This character is still around, by the way, and does pop up every so often in DC Comics, although now he’s a gold-colored talking gorilla known as Congorilla. Now that sounds like a fun movie.

READ MORE: 20 Actors You Forgot Were in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Today, the Guardians of the Galaxy are a massive multimedia franchise, but it’s worth noting just how obscure they were when Marvel first announced they were turning them into a movie that would be released between the second Captain America and second Avengers titles. The MCU Guardians were mostly inspired by a series that debuted in 2008 that included characters like Rocket Raccoon — an Marvel obscurity who appeared in a total of ten comics in the first 30 years of his existence. Not ten different storylines, not ten different Rocket Raccoon series; ten individual issues period, mostly guest spots in other characters’ books. That’s pretty obscure!

Eternals (2021)

Real Marvel sickos knew Eternals before 2021. They were one of Jack Kirby’s key creations during his final tenure at Marvel in the late 1970s. Kirby’s Eternals comic explored many of his favorite themes and boasted tons of his bombastic superhero imagery. But after Kirby left Marvel for good, the characters were only occasionally resurrected for brief miniseries or graphic novels. To hype the Eternals film, Marvel’s publishing arm did reintegrate the characters into the Marvel Universe, and even gave them a co-headlining role in a crossover book called A.X.E. — as in “Avengers/X-Men/Eternals.” Then the movie bombed and the Eternals slid back into semi-obscurity.

Jonah Hex (2010)

Jonah Hex, a grumpy and facially-scarred cowboy from the Old West, has a long history in DC Comics. Does anyone who’s never stepped foot in a comic shop have any idea about him or that history? No chance. And that didn’t really change after the Jonah Hex movie, one of the biggest bombs in comic-book movie history. Josh Brolin played Hex (much to his later chagrin) in a film that barely clocked in at 80 minutes long, even after it underwent extensive but futile reshoots.

The Losers (2010)

Like the Guardians of Galaxy over at Marvel, DC has given the name “The Losers” to several groups of characters over the years. The original Losers were a brigade of World War II soldiers who battled the Axis in the pages of Our Fighting Forces. In 2003, the Losers title was bestowed upon a group that appeared in a mature series from DC’s Vertigo Comics imprint. These Losers were former CIA agents who set out to get revenge against their former employers. That’s the book the served as the inspiration for the 2010 film, which starred Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldaña, Idris Elba, and future Captain America (and former Johnny Storm) Chris Evans.

Madame Web (2024)

You would think that a woman whose arch-nemesis was in the Amazon with her mom when she was researching spiders just before she died would be one of the most popular comic-book characters in history. You would be wrong! Madame Web was, at best, a key supporting character during a couple of eras of Spider-Man comics. But she had never even starred in her own comic book when Sony gave her an entire movie starring Dakota Johnson.

Morbius (2022)

This is what a Sony Spider-Man Universe (without Spider-Man) has wrought: A whole bunch of junky “spinoffs” (like Madame Web!) starring minor Spidey supporting characters that even hardcore Marvel zombies can barely care about. And I say this as a guy who wrote an entire book about Spider-Man comics; I know who Morbius is, and I could barely care about Jared Leto playing the character, especially in a cruddy horror-action picture about a hunky scientist who tries to cure himself of a rare blood disease and accidentally turns himself into a “living vampire.”

The New Mutants (2020)

Yes, there was a period where The New Mutants was a solid-selling Marvel title. But those days were long over by 2020, when the undead remains of 20th Century Fox (now owned by Disney) released the long-delayed New Mutants movie. If we asked 100 random people on the street “Who are the members of the New Mutants?” how many could name a single one? I could see maybe a couple saying something like “Was Cable a member of that group?” which would be correct — but of course Cable’s not in The New Mutants movie. (He appeared in Deadpool 2 instead, where he was played by Jonah Hex himself, Josh Brolin.)

The Spirit (2008)

Technically Will Eisner’s great comic strip The Spirit was created independently, and his adventures have been published by a variety of companies since his introduction roughly 80 years ago. But one of those companies is DC Comics, who have released multiple The Spirit series and even a crossover comic where Eisner’s creation met Batman. Comic-book aficionados and superhero historians adore The Spirit because of Eisner’s inventive visual storytelling, but The Spirit movie ultimately happened because the big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City became a surprise hit, and Miller wanted to make a movie version of The Spirit. The results were … less than ideal.

Spy Smasher (1942)

Several of the earliest comic-book adaptations to hit the big screen were versions of characters from Fawcett Comics, a now-defunct publisher that was the original home of Captain Marvel. DC now owns the Fawcett library, which means they also control the rights to Spy Smasher, a costumed adventurer who used an assortment of gadgets to  defend America during World War II. Spy Smasher became a historical footnote after the war ended, but I’ll tell you this: His serial, directed by William Witney, is one of the very best that was made during the form’s heyday. If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill, you could do a lot worse than watch Spy Smasher bust some heads for 214 minutes.

Thunderbolts* (2025)

Last but not least: The Thunderbolts, a group that was first introduced in the 1990s as a bunch of villains (You ever heard of the Masters of Evil?) pretending to be heroes in order to ingratiate themselves to the public in order to take over the world. Multiple teams have used the Thunderbolts monicker through the decades, none sticking around for all that long — perhaps one reason why the Thunderbolts movie, which pretty good by recent MCU standards, was a box-office disappoint. If Marvel had gone with the movie’s “surprise” second title, The New Avengers, that might have been something.