Comic book movies will always fly

Well, the "Sin City" sequel isn't making any money, so I guess we've seen the end of movies based on comic books.

Ha, ha! Just kidding. "Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" is tanking at the box office, but movies based on comics aren't going anywhere. I just like making fun of those movie critics who desperately want movies based on comics — especially superhero movies — to go away.

Oh, those scamps! Don't they know that one "Avengers" (worldwide box office: $1.5 billion) outweighs any 20 badly performing superhero movies? There have already been a lot of movies derived from comics that are just plain terrible, and the roof hasn't caved in yet. No matter how bad those movies were, most of them made money.

There are few superhero movies worse than "Batman and Robin," the 1997 campfest. All anyone really remembers about "B&R" is that the Dynamic Duo sported impressively large Bat-nipples. Cost? $125 million. Worldwide gross? $238 million.

With money like that possible for even a universally loathed Bat-movie, it's no wonder that Warner Bros. relaunched the franchise only eight years later with "Batman Begins." Heck, Sony only waited five years after the end of its first Spider-Man trilogy to launch a second one.

But those are mostly good movies, and let's face it, the bulk of movies based on comics are so awful they could make the village idiot weep with impotent rage. For example:

• "The Spirit" (2008): Director Frank Miller took a charming, beloved comic book series by charming, beloved comic book creator Will Eisner and turned it into something so utterly charmless and unlovable that it lost $21 million.

• "Green Lantern" (2011): Ryan Reynolds was in one of those Blade movies also, and was just as forgettable as DC's Emerald Gladiator in this big-budget, would-be franchise launcher.

• "Catwoman" (2004) and "Elektra" (2005): Both of these movies starred extremely attractive women in skimpy leather. So how on earth were they so painfully dull and nonsensical that even teenage boys were turned off?

• "Fantastic Four": Most people know two of these films were so infantile that not even Chris Evans and Jessica Alba could save them. But there was a third "Fantastic Four" film, made in 1994 and never released. It was directed by schlockmeister Roger Corman in just a few weeks, and was so terrifyingly bad that Marvel producer Avi Arad reportedly bought up all the copies just to destroy them. Don't worry, it's on YouTube.

• "Superman": "Superman III" (1983) misused Richard Pryor badly, but still made money. "Superman IV" (1987) ran out of money midway, which showed on screen, and lost $1.8 million. But the worst was "Superman Returns" (2006), which turned the Man of Steel into a deadbeat dad and a Super-voyeur (with X-ray vision)!