I never said these (entries about important comic book stuff) would be in any kind of order.
In Drax: Earthfall, Giffen & Breitweiser took a character who had been on the slide basically forever, and made him super interesting and relevant again. Old-school Drax was created by Jim Starlin as a purple-cowled foil/weapon against Thanos, and they kind of jerked him around a lot. To my young reader's mind, he was a boring background part of the space opera, a genre that didn't always fly in comics anyway. Once they made him huge and Hulk-like and stupid, he was insufferable and annoying.
In Earthfall, he apparently (because he's too dumb at this point to know not to) drinks something called singularity drive fluid and survives it and a major crash. This results in a bad-ass redesign and makes him into a hard-as-nails no-compromise killer. For the first time - and you should read the story rather than take my word for it - Drax, and the characters surrounding him had real drama and strife that mattered. And he was kind of terrifying, with a real anti-hero vibe that made him matter again.
It was this version that became part of the Guardians of the Galaxy in the lead-up to Annihilation, and who ripped out Thanos' heart (comics characters rarely stay dead). Unfortunately, for the Bautista movie version, they seem to have melded the denseness of mind with the brutal remorseless killer, and while the portrayal works well in the MCU and I kind of dig it there, it does seem a shame to not have this version on film. It taught me more than anything that you can't give up on characters as long as there's talent and will around to revive them in a way that makes sense.
But yeah, you could easily argue that without this reinvention of Drax, you wouldn't have a popular enough GotG to merit film inclusion on the MCU.