The Umbrella Academy's quirky superhero action, adult pathos, oddball worldbuilding, and apocalyptic
mystery make it one of a kind.
But plenty of other stories play with similar ideas about special abilities being a curse
and sci-fi psychology.
If you want to see the show's biggest ideas explored further, be sure to check out these
movies next.
Light Turner finds a mysterious notebook with a special power: If he writes a person's name
in it while picturing their face, they'll die.
And he uses it.
Often.
First, Light bumps off the local bully.
Next, he takes out the man who killed his mom.
After that, he starts killing criminals all over the world while using the alter-ego Kira,
who's worshipped like a god.
But the Death Note comes with side effects.
For one, a death god named Ryuk haunts Light at every step.
"Hey, kid!"
"It's pronounced, 'ree-yook.'"
"Ree-yook.
Oh.
Hi."
His new girlfriend, Mia, is beginning to get a little too invested in Kira's crusade, and
pushes Light to overstep his boundaries.
Meanwhile, Light's father is hunting Kira, as is a mysterious masked man known only as
L, who happens to be one of the best detectives on the planet.
Death Note, which is based on an exceptionally popular manga and anime series, has everything
The Umbrella Academy fans love: It's a pitch black fantasy story about a young adult trying
to control some very weird powers.
It's full of strange worldbuilding.
By the time we learn that L was experimented on as a child as part of a government program
designed to produce world-class detectives, we're well into Umbrella Academy territory.
Most of all, it's all about trauma and facing consequences.
While Death Note has a global scope, it's really an intimate story about relationships
between just a few people.
It's no secret that there's a lot of the X-Men in The Umbrella Academy's DNA.
But while the setup is familiar territory, The Umbrella Academy manages to twist those
familiar tropes into something that feels fresh and new, covering ground Marvel's merry
mutants would never dare to tread.
And what The Umbrella Academy does for X-Men, The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion does for
Superman.
The movie opens with a young girl, Ja-yoon, escaping from a violent encounter at a mysterious
lab.
She shelters with a couple of farmers, who adopt and raise her.
Ten years later, Ja-yoon isn't fighting for truth and justice.
She's forgotten where she came from and suffering mysterious headaches.
Her family is struggling to fight off poverty as her mother succumbs to dementia.
Ja-Yoon does what she can to help out: She goes on a televised singing contest, where
her voice and superpowers wow the judges and the audience.
Unfortunately, the performance also attracts the attention of the scientists who originally
experimented on her.
That's when The Witch: Part 1's big twist kicks in and it's one hell of a twist.
We won't give it away here, but you'll never look at super-powered teens the same way again.
The Umbrella Academy's mature content is definitely not for kids.
So instead, show your little ones the film version of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate
Events, which captures all of The Umbrella Academy's macabre whimsy wrapped in a child-friendly
package.
It isn't exactly light fare, though.
The movie begins when Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are orphaned and put in the custody
of their cruel uncle Count Olaf, played by Jim Carrey at his manic best.
Olaf just wants the Baudelaire family fortune, which Violet is set to inherit when she turns
18, and he'll use every trick he can to get it.
"Oh, my dear…"
"...Violet."
Olaf's increasingly elaborate schemes and the Baudelaire siblings' attempts to foil
them propel the movie's plot and fuel its twisted sense of humor.
Like The Umbrella Academy, it's a story about orphans who must band together in incredibly
unusual circumstances.
And while they don't have superpowers, there's a distinctly magical quality to the world
they live in.
A Series of Unfortunate Events leans more towards the gothic than The Umbrella Academy
does, but there's a lot of undeniable overlap.
It takes a little while for Svaha: The Sixth Finger's similarities to The Umbrella Academy
to become obvious.
Svaha feels more like a dark detective story than a sci-fi superhero romp.
At first glance, Pastor Park's investigation into a new Buddhist cult, which may have been
involved in the killing of a schoolgirl, doesn't seem like it has much in common with the Hargreeves'
adventures at all.
But then the similarities start to appear.
Young Geumhwa, who has no powers, has a twin sister who does.
In fact, she's a hairy monster who's been classified as a demon and spends her life
locked away in the garage.
Guemhwa's struggles with being the "normal" sibling end up being Svaha's most effective
subplot.
Meanwhile, Park's mission as a professional religious debunker leads him to a Buddhist
leader who adopted four young men, all juvenile offenders, and trained them to be the "heroes"
in a supernatural fight against evil, psychologically damaging them in the process.
If you took The Umbrella Academy's underlying themes, shook them up, layered on a healthy
dose of Buddhist mythology, and gave the whole thing a gothic sheen, Svaha: The Sixth Finger
is probably what you'd get.
Yes, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse features a young hero coming to grips with his powers
and the kind of dimension-hopping madness that makes The Umbrella Academy such a treat.
But that's not why Into the Spider-Verse is on this list.
Its connection to The Umbrella Academy goes much, much deeper than just those surface
details.
Gerard Way, the writer of The Umbrella Academy comic, actually co-created Peni Parker, the
super-teen who pilots a mech powered by a radioactive spider, in 2014's Edge of Spider-Verse
#5.
"I'm from New York in the year 3145.
I have a psychic link with a spider who lives inside my father's robot."
But there's another tonal similarity between Into the Spider-Verse and The Umbrella Academy,
too: Peter B. Parker, voiced by Jake Johnson.
Johnson's Parker has been a superhero for years, and his time in the tights has taken
its toll.
His youthful exuberance is gone, and his experiences have left him beaten down, depressed, and
broken.
In other words, if Peter B. ever teamed up with the adult version of The Umbrella Academy,
he'd fit right in.
The Umbrella Academy comes by its trauma honestly.
Just look at what happened during their first public outing, when they were still kids:
Allison convinced a man to shoot his friend.
Diego stabbed a man in the chest from across the room.
Luther tossed a criminal out of a second-story window from the first floor.
Ben transformed into a tentacled beast and literally tore the rest of the bank robbers
into pieces.
It's enough to raise a big question: With their powers, are the members of the Umbrella
Academy heroes, or are they monsters?
That idea is just one small part of The Umbrella Academy.
But if that's a theme that interests you, be sure to check out The Girl with All the
Gifts, which makes that particular question the movie's main focus.
Like the Umbrella Academy's recruits, The Girl with All the Gifts' Melanie has some
pretty spectacular abilities.
She's absurdly smart.
She has super-strength and a highly developed sense of smell.
But thanks to the fungus wrapped around her brain, she's also a second-generation zombie
who'll chomp on human flesh unless the people around her are very careful.
Melanie also happens to be the key ingredient in a cure for the zombie plague, but The Girl
with All the Gifts' real concern is whether or not this precocious, charming child is
human, an abomination, or something in between.
It doesn't offer any easy answers, either.
Even by comic book standards, The Umbrella Academy's superpowers are pretty trippy.
Gossip-induced mind control?
The power to talk to ghosts?
The ability to bend the trajectory of thrown objects?
Those are all pretty unusual.
You can find something similar in Lucid Dream, written and directed by first-time filmmaker
Kim Joon-sung.
In it, investigative journalist Choi Dae-ho's young son is kidnapped during a trip to an
amusement park.
Three years later, Dae-ho is at the end of his rope.
With no leads in the case, he turns to lucid dreaming to help solve the mystery of his
missing kid.
At first, Dae-ho simply relives the day his son disappeared, looking for clues.
But it's not long before he's upped his game, jumping in and out of other people's dreams,
including those of a coma patient, in his search for the truth.
It's fun to see Dae-Ho find new ways to use his growing abilities, and the dream-based
landscapes lead to a few surreal action scenes that Umbrella Academy fans will dig.
Anyone who likes seeing some unique superpowers in action is sure to have a pretty good time.
Despite growing up in a huge, strange family, every member of the Umbrella Academy feels
alone.
But Vanya is even more isolated than the rest.
She's the only one who grew up without superpowers.
She didn't get to join in any of the crime-fighting fun, and she has a very hard time relating
to her powered siblings as a result.
The Indonesian horror movie The 3rd Eye covers much of the same ground.
Like Vanya, there's nothing special about Alia.
All the unique abilities seem to have been saved for Alia's younger sister, Abel, who,
like The Umbrella Academy's Klaus, speaks to ghosts.
That changes when Alia and Abel return to their childhood home after their parents pass
away, and Alia begins to realize that she too has the potential to unlock her third
eye and see into the spirit world.
From there, things take a decidedly different turn.
The 3rd Eye is a ghost story, not an offbeat superhero adventure, and it sticks to established
horror movie tropes.
That said, The Umbrella Academy's heart isn't in its superheroics.
It's in the complicated and nuanced relationship between the Hargreeves siblings, and how their
abilities isolate them from one another.
Strip away the genre trappings, and you'll find that in The 3rd Eye too.
You've heard this story before: Boy meets girl.
Boy and girl become friends, even if boy wishes it would turn into something more.
Over time, boy and girl grow apart, until one night at a party girl has a near-death
experience probably related to aliens and forgets everything that happened to her.
In a panic, girl calls boy, who comes rushing to her side as she begins exhibiting strange
and unnatural powers, attracts the attention of sinister federal agents, and goes on the
run.
Oh, and it's a love story.
It's a tale as old as time.
At First Light shares many of The Umbrella Academy's central conceits.
There's a teenager grappling with newfound powers that become increasingly dangerous
as they grow in strength.
There are supernatural mysteries, as well as a big world full of wild conspiracies.
There's a focus on family and the various complications that come with it.
It's just the tone that's different.
While The Umbrella Academy is an absurd superhero drama, At First Light is firmly entrenched
in the young-adult romance tradition.
Théodore Pellerin and Stefanie Scott turn in two very compelling performances, and its
small-scale take on an alien abduction story goes a long way toward making it stand apart.
There's a lunacy at the core of The Umbrella Academy that cannot be contained.
It's a show with a monkey butler and a robot mom.
It features time-traveling assassins and futuristic prosthetic eyes.
One of the main characters is a ghost.
Another has the body of an ape.
And yet, by Iron Sky standards, The Umbrella Academy is merely quirky.
In the first Iron Sky movie, viewers learned that the Nazis had spent the 70 years since
the end of World War II building the Fourth Reich on the Moon, then saw them attack Earth
in flying saucers and start a nuclear war.
In its sequel, The Coming Race, there are no limits.
A race of lizard people emerge from the center of the Earth and impersonate great human leaders.
Adolf Hitler rides a dinosaur.
The Holy Grail pops up for some reason.
The last remnants of humanity worship Steve Jobs.
"Now let us pray for our holy father, Steve, to shed light on us.
Look at your e-prayer app."
Iron Sky: The Coming Race has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek.
Absurdity is the point.
Anything else is just a distraction from ridiculous stuff.
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