Betting on a Bounty Hunter, and Perhaps Love

Los Angeles — His nasty scarred cheek flashes by in an instant. The potentially offensive Confederate stars and bars are nowhere to be seen.

But, yes, that is Jonah Hex, one of the meanest antiheroes in the comic-book world, romancing Megan Fox and, as played by Josh Brolin, looking rather more appealing than usual in the teaser on a Warner Brothers Web site that promotes his namesake film.

Set for release on June 18, "Jonah Hex" is Warner's latest effort to find a movie hit in the trove of graphic novels and hard-edged comics locked within its DC Entertainment unit, behind the two major moneymakers, Batman and Superman. It has not been easy.

While dark graphic novels and sophisticated comics have long been hot properties on Hollywood's development circuit — on July 22, the annual swarm of filmmakers, agents, producers and executives will descend on San Diego for its Comic-Con International fantasy convention — much of the film audience has yet to buy in.

Apart from those featuring the big-name heroes, including Marvel Entertainment's Spider-Man and the X-Men, only a tiny handful of properties from the comic book world have spawned a true blockbuster for any studio.

To date, the best performer in an on-screen pool of comic-based lurkers (as in "The Spirit"), lunatics (in "The Mask"), and antiheroes (in most) has been "Men in Black," about a pair of black-clad alien hunters, which attracted $250.1 million at the domestic box office when Sony Pictures released it nearly 13 years ago.

Warner's only major comic-inspired hit, apart from its lucrative Batman and Superman series, was "300," about the battle of Thermopylae. Based on a series published by Dark Horse Comics and illustrated by Frank Miller, the film had domestic ticket sales of $210.6 million in 2007.

Past efforts to mine DC, which was acquired by Warner in 1969, have often hit a wall. Its "Watchmen," one of the most revered of graphic novels, about a tawdry group of banished crime fighters, took in barely more than $100 million at the box office last year, despite months of prerelease hoopla and a costly court battle that left 20th Century Fox with a portion of the receipts.

"V for Vendetta" and "Constantine," also based on DC comics, were stuck at about $70 million, while "The Losers," another DC-based film, was a major disappointment, with only about $23.1 million in ticket sales since its release last month.

"There's a limit to all these things," said Mark Evanier, an author and screenwriter who has been a fixture at Comic-Con. Speaking by telephone last week about what he perceived to be a new wariness in Hollywood toward the darker and more esoteric comics, Mr. Evanier added: "It's starting to feel like there's a fall coming."

Warner is betting heavily that its "Green Lantern," which is now shooting and is set for release in June 2011, will open the door to a new wave of DC-based films. But first it has to make something out of "Jonah Hex." A relatively inexpensive film, with production costs of about $50 million, it occupies prime real estate on Warner's summer schedule — and points up the difficulty of turning an outsider's art form into movies with broad appeal.

The comic "Jonah Hex," begun as a DC character first written by John Albano and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga in the early 1970s, reveled in the violent nature of a hero whose skills as a killer, honed as a Confederate fighter in the Civil War, later made him an unholy terror (though with an urge to protect the innocent) as a bounty hunter in the Old West.

Eventually, DC compiled the early stories in a book entitled "Jonah Hex: Face Full of Violence." The title referred to a trademark facial scar so deep that Mr. Brolin, in the extended movie clips that Warner has been showing around fan conventions for the last year, appears to have a hole in his cheek.

While Hollywood's early summer movies have typically been softer stuff, "Jonah Hex," which had no rating posted on the Classification and Rating Administration Web site as of Friday, appears pointed toward an R for violence, not to mention Mr. Brolin's bawdy exchanges with Ms. Fox, who plays a hooker with the heart of, well, a hooker.

Speaking on a panel at Comic-Con last July, Ms. Fox at least slightly shocked the nearly shock-proof crowd by saying that she had reached for authenticity by telling a co-star, Michael Fassbender, that it would be all right to "smack me" or otherwise beat her while shooting. "I said, leave your fetishes at home, please, we're here to work," said Mr. Fassbender, who was also on the panel. In creating a hit from "300," based on similarly tough material, Warner and its partner Legendary Pictures — which is also a producer of "Jonah Hex" — changed the underlying story to expand a female-oriented subplot that considerably widened the film’s appeal.

Perhaps inevitably, some Jonah Hex purists are now complaining that Warner and Legendary, along with the director Jimmy Hayward — whose only previous directing credit is the animated "Horton Hears a Who!" — have softened their favorite bounty hunter by leaning into a love story, of sorts, and playing up a supernatural dimension to his skills.

After watching scenes from "Jonah Hex" at a horror convention recently, Mr. Thompson said he had the impression that Warner and its allies were straining to make a movie in the mold of its hero-oriented comic book hits, "instead of having enough faith to use the actual material."

In fact, the Jonah Hex comics went through enough changes through the years — some of the later story lines involved time travel — that authenticity is less an issue than the cinematic integrity of a film that required some widely reported reshoots, with help from the "Constantine" director Francis Lawrence, to iron the kinks out of its plot and character portrayal.

Even before those adjustments, Mr. Brolin allowed that getting a movie out of this particular part of the DC canon had not been easy.

"I don't know why, but I said, 'It's a phantasmagoria of insanity,' " Mr. Brolin told the crowd at Comic-Con last year. "And I think that pretty much depicts what our experience was."