Comic Book Movies - Investigative Research

It appears that Pathfinder is similar in it's genesis to The Fountain (which I still haven't seen, dadgummit). I heard recently that Pathfinder (recently released on DVD) was based on a Dark Horse comic. Lo and behold, I do an internet search, and a ton of sites came up saying the same thing. But it doesn't seem to be that simple. Keep searching, and a number of sites (including some info on IMDB), indicate that it's based on the 1987 movie Ofelas.

So what's the truth? Well, aside from discussions about whether or not we can actually know truth, it appears there's a bit in both. According to this article on Movies Online, the producers originally intended to do a remake of the 1987 film. They ended up meeting director Marcus Nispel and the movie took a bit of a different path, so to speak.

As Nispel took the film in a slightly different direction, he was having trouble getting it off the ground, and he describes in this interview with Coming Soon how he decided to make it into a comic, and soon after, the film was greenlit. While it appears there was some synergy between making the comic and making the film, it's not technically based on the comic. More like The Fountain, it was a movie with a troubled production that became a comic, but was finally released as a movie.

There...all better. I can sleep tonight, now that I've got my head wrapped around the unraveling of another comic book movie mystery.