I would love to see this classic as a movie, but the technical demands and story complexity of believably portraying all the dozens/hundreds of meta-humans and “supers” in a live action film and have the story be coherent, seems beyond the capability of even the biggest budget and movie panorama.
Is it possible? Who are the actors?
Difficult.
It’s my understanding that the reason we don’t see more ‘crossover’ type DC projects with vast swaths of superheroes is that there are complex rights and royalties issues with many of the characters.
Now, if I am incorrect in that, or if those problems are resolved, then it’s a bit more feasable. Still, I don’t think it’s something we will see soon - if DC milks the moviegoing public for ten years with a bunch of solid, well-made and interconnected moives… like Marvel is doing now… thus establishing the ‘DC Universe’ as a character in the minds of the movie watchers, then it could work.
Except that “Kingdom Come” then takes that DC Universe and breaks it to pieces after shoving it all forward a generation.
Not that many…AFAIK, it’s only a couple Quality and Charlton characters - the Blackhawks, Plastic Man, and Blue Beetle, off the top of my head, and Beetle’s rights are wholly DC/Warner’s now - but the big names are theirs free and clear, and the smaller ones can be written around, as JLU showed.
Now that Blue Beetle is theirs, that element would only effect the background of Kingdom Come - and even then, only slightly.
I’m not sure how adding the MLJ and Milestone characters to their main universe will complicate things later on, though.
But, no, I don’t think Kingdom Come could work as a live action film. Either the background characters makeup and effects budgets would be killer, or the results would be highly unsatisfactory. The Rogues’ bar, alone…
And since it wouldn’t be marketed to a comic-fan audience, all of the different makeups and costumes would likely be seen as wasted effort and expense, and thus genericized, which will piss off the fanboys, and dull the most interesting part of the series.
Are the Marvel movies interconnected? Opportunities to have them overlap, even peripherally, have been stymied by various rights conflicts, including having the Ben Urich character from the Daredevil film be a reported for the New York Post, not the Daily Bugle.
What elements, aside from random cameos by Stan Lee, do these movies have in common:
Daredevil
X-Men 1-3
Spider-Man 1-3
Fantastic Four 1-2
Iron Man and the new Incredible Hulk might tie-in, with an “Avengers” linkage, but that remains to be seen.
Personally, I’d’ve been happy to have one common element in all the films be the Daily Bugle reporting on the antics of the various characters (with photos bylines by Peter Parker, even if he doesn’t actually appear) and cameos by J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson.
You forgot the Blade trilogy. But then, I’m trying to do that myself, so I shan’t blame you.
Anyway…I think what CandidGamera is that the post-FF2 Marvel movies are being consciously set in the same fictional universe, while the preceding ones were not. The currentt idea, I think, is to set Captain America in the same 'verse as IM and Hulk, and then to lead into a full-blown crossover movie with the Avengers. Spider-Man would be easy to retroactively put into that context; X-Men would be harder, but then, I’d be happier if the X-Men didn’t exist in the Marvel U anyway.
Oh, he means now now.
I think it would work better as an HBO miniseries. And if done properly, it could kick ass.
Yes. 
to jayjay : Yes, that’s the point. It’s not interesting to break a fictional universe into pieces unless you’re familiar with what it looked like to begin with.
If anything was going to be turned into such a series, I’d vote Grayson.
X-Men 3 had a comparable number of super-characters with complex backstories. It was nobody’s favorite superhero movie of any category. Kingdom Come, done flawlessly, would delight nobody but us hardcore comic book geeks, and it’s my understanding that there are fewer than 300,000 of us. History shows that Hollywood would bungle the task and that I would hate the result.
A truly great Superman movie has yet to be made. Of the last six Batman movies, I’d call two of them great. Warner Bros. has a lot of baby steps to take before they glom onto something as ambitious as Kingdom Come.
That’s a point. But I don’t know how it would go down, really. There’s a difference between “loyal readership” and “loyal viewership”, and DC had to give themselves the “Elseworlds” escape valve on Kingdom Come as it is. I don’t know that the mass market film demographic is going to react to it the way that the special edition comic book demographic did.
I dunno about that - the generic backstory to the X-Men mutants is that they were born that way. Somebody shows up with a wierd power, he’s a mutant, 'nuff said.
Arguably, the only backstories explored in any detail were:
First movie: Magneto, Rogue
Second movie: Iceman/Bobby Drake, Wolverine
Third movie: Phoenix
What’s the backstory of Storm? Cyclops? Colossus? Beast? Professor X? Mystique? If any of these were explored in any detail beyond a throwaway line or two, I must’ve missed it.
Afterthought: Angel’s history was explored somewhat in X-Men 3 as well.
Ypou could say essentially the same thing about Flash or Green Lantern. Lots of the X# characters have complex backstories.
Well, when a Flash or Green Lantern movie gets made, we can discuss it.