Why Hollywood Won't Give Cable His Own Movie

In the current cultural superhero craze, anything is possible—and potentially profitable. Established heroes have had terrible film track records (We're looking at you, Green Lantern) while relative unknowns like Jessica Jones and Luke Cage have enjoyed critical and commercial success. We've watched some truly bizarre characters be brought to life, like Guardians of the Galaxy fan favorites Groot and Rocket Raccoon. It doesn't need to make sense—the only rule is that it has to be entertaining. (Call it the rule of Deadpool.) So with all that said, why hasn't Hollywood given Cable his own movie? Turns out this is one comics adaptation that's trickier than you might think.

Whether it's Cable and Deadpool, New Mutants, or Cable and X-Force, one thing is consistent with Cable—he's no headline act. Either as a sidekick or part of an ensemble, his personality is such that he works best as a foil for other characters, be they Wolverine, Professor X, or Wade Wilson's Merc with a Mouth. While Cable has had his own series before, in the 1990s and late 2000s, it seems clear at this point that he works best in groups. A light touch is needed with Cable. A little goes a long way.

With all that in mind, it's understandable that Cable is something of a joke in certain circles, held up as an exemplar of comic books' convoluted plots and the excesses of character design in the 1990s. Though Cable creator Rob Liefeld is a very successful artist in the industry, Cable is regarded by many as representing everything that's controversial about Liefeld's work, which is often described as excessive or anatomically absurd. Fellow artist Alex Ross, who has called Cable's design "godawful," breaks down everything that's unappealing about the character when he says he "it looked like they just threw up everything on the character—the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what's with all the guns?"

Let's talk about Cable's powers. Like his mother, he's telekinetic, able to manipulate matter with his mind, and his cybernetic eye and arm give him enhanced vision and super strength. Also? He can travel through time, he's built like a redwood tree and loves gigantic Nerf-style guns. In other words, he's way too powerful, and seems like he was designed by a committee of ten-year-old boys. Which actually isn't that far from being inaccurate:

Fans of superhero cinema may recall the rather odd existence of two versions of the character Quicksilver, one played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson from Avengers: Age of Ultron, and another played by Evan Peters in the X-Men series. How did this happen? It has everything to do with which studios hold the rights to which characters, and Cable, like Quicksilver, is on somewhat shaky ground.

Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men are all Marvel Comics creations, but due to how the movie business functions, Marvel Studios doesn't have the rights to make movies about all those characters. The Fantastic Four and the X-Men film right s all live at 20th Century Fox, and if you've ever read an X-Men comic, you know it's a team that tends to sprawl. In the comics, Quicksilver and Cable are mutants, but they don't solely appear in X-Men properties. They show up in other places, and they function on their own. Which makes things tricky from a rights perspective. In the Quicksilver example, Age of Ultron's iteration simply wasn't a mutant, and neither was the Scarlet Witch. While both characters appeared in Avengers comic books for years, their origins as mutants were erased and altered to better fit the needs of the MCU...and to avoid rights issues with the X-Men movie franchise. Meanwhile, Fox could use him as a mutant (and the implied son of Magneto) in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Cable has the same problem. While the rights to the character would seem to be with Fox based on his mutant origins, Marvel has reportedly done tentative work in getting a movie of his developed as though the rights are theirs. Partnerships between studios are not unheard of, of course—the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming is a Marvel/Sony co-production—but this rights wrinkle does add one more complication to the stack of reasons why Cable is a hard prospect for a solo feature. But perhaps there is another way.

The bottom line: there's a lot standing in the way of a Cable movie, and the odds of him surviving the page-to-screen transition without significant changes are pretty much zero. When a character needs extensive reimagining to be viable onscreen, that's a problem. If you have any doubts about what a lose-lose scenario this is, look no further than Galactus. In the comics, he's commonly depicted as a purple-suited giant lumbering through the cosmos, eating worlds for sustenance. On the page, this flies: your imagination does the work for you. But the creators of 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, unable to imagine how this sight would play on screen (and really, can you blame them?) instead opted to portray him as a giant cloud. Viewers of the film were unimpressed, as were comics loyalists who asked why the filmmakers would bother settling for a name-only version of Galactus. (Weirdly, the Fantastic Four films persistently have the same issues with figuring out how to portray Dr. Doom.)

The current popularity of superhero movies makes it easy to assume we'll almost certainly see a live-action version of Cable at some point. But with all the baggage that he brings—not to mention how few people are really walking around begging for a movie starring the guy—it's no surprise he doesn't seem to be a top priority. For now, the big screen will probably continue to suffer from an ongoing Cable outage.