I would rather see it based off of an existing comic book story. However, since they only use the comics as a basis, the original article will never be truly 100% faithfully presented. My main request is that a movie remain faithful to the spirit of the characters and story. Sometimes being too literal would hinder a movie--Peter Parker creating his own webshooters would have taken another half an hour of exposition to get it right. As long as the movie remains faithful to the spirit of the character, I'm usually a happy camper. Ideally, each movie would be like Sin City--with the writer/creator directing it and ripping scenes and dialogue straight from the book, but Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman Begins didn't do that and they were wonderful films. X-Men and Batman Begins essential told--to my knowledge, pretty much an all new story, but a story firmly planted in their respective mythos. It's no big stretch for Ra's Al Ghul to act the way he did in Batman, or for Magneto to try a massive mutation wave, or whatnot in X-Men.
Over the years there have been so many interpretations, who is to say there is a correct one? Certainly, I would err on the side of the original comics, but even those can be so contradictory and confusing.
I'd be interested in seeing your paper as it progresses, and would be happy to put forth any more of my opinions as needed. 馃檪
In some cases they should, with better knwon characters, like Spiderman, which they didn't do and Batman. But if the character is lesser knwon, Like Blade for example, they should be free to change some things. In Blade's cases I think it was for the best because, the Blade in the original comics looked like a Shaft reject, and so they changed it and the movies turned out awesome. Over all they should have some creative leeway but not abucnh.
Most of the characters who are being made into movies have a good forty hears of continuity behind them; this is not a good thing. It's stiffling. I think it's good that movies give companies the chance to mess around a little without worrying, for example, that the villain they want to use was killed off in some crappy company-wide crossover event. In other words, they should stay true to the character, but not let continuity get in the way of a good story.
But ... if you put down an internet message board as one of your sources for a term paper, your instructer's going to throw something at you. At least he should.