For years, Stan Lee tried to get Marvel’s characters adapted to film. I remember hearing the casting news for the famously never-released Fantastic Four when I was reading comics; the fact that I’d never heard of any of them meant nothing to me because I wasn’t into TV or movies at the time. Finally, in 1998, Blade became Marvel’s first successful film, and with X-Men and Spider-Man following, the Marvel Age of film had finally arrived.