We at Multiversity were all quite bummed out to hear that Edgar Wright was no longer going to be directing Ant-Man for Marvel. This is just the latest in a long tine of great/weird/bizarre comic adaptations that didn’t happen. Today, let’s take a look at ten of them.
10. Terry Gilliam’s Watchmen
Long considered almost unfilmable, Watchmen eventually was made by Zach Snyder, who stayed very close to the source material until the ending of the film. However, nearly two decades earlier, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys director Terry Gilliam was attempting to adapt the book, and shook up the ending even more. Producer Joel Silver talked to CommingSoon.net about what Gilliam’s ending would have entailed:
Silver: What Terry had done, and it was a Sam Hamm script–who had written a script that everybody loved for the first “Batman”–and then he brought in a guy who’d worked for him to do work on it [Charles McKeown, co-writer of “Brazil”]. What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from “Watchmen” only became characters in a comic book.
That’s fascinating. Very META.
Silver: Oh yeah. So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There’s a kid reading the comic book and he’s like, “Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.” It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.
Gilliam is no stranger to the surreal or the meta, and the ending would have surely been as much, if not more, controversial than what Snyder filmed. However, the film might also have taken on a life of its own, and not been so beholden to every tiny detail of the original work, the way Snyder’s film was.
9. Mort, the Dead Teenager
This is one of the more obscure comic films considered, but the pedigree working on it was anything but B-list: produced by Quentin Tarantino, starring Elijah Wood and Jessica Simpson, the 2002-announced project just never got off the ground. This is after Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis optioned the property and did nothing with it years earlier.
For those that aren’t familiar with the character, it was created by Larry Hama and Gary Hallgren, and had its own miniseries in 1993. While the premise is pretty fun (teenager is killed, meets the Grim Reaper’s son, comes back to Earth to win the girl), it still features a teenager being decapitated. That may not be the type of origin story Hollywood is apt to tell.
8. Justice League: Mortal
Despite a half-way decent script (based on the “Tower of Babel” story by Mark Waid and Howard Porter), and some relatively inspired casting (Common as John Stewart, Armie Hammer as Batman), this film would have been a mess for a very simple reason: the film was to feature new actors playing Batman and Superman, even though there were currently different actors playing the same characters in their standalone films.
So, basically, there would be two different people wearing the Bat-cowl, not explained in any way. This would have been a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and would have lead to an extraordinarily weird situation.
Continued below7. She-Hulk
This story is a little fuzzy, as some reports say that Brigitte Nielsen (ex of Sylvester Stallone, ex of Flava Flav) simply was hired by Marvel to take photos as She-Hulk, where others say that she had signed on to star in a film adaptation. Either way, physically, Nielsen is a pretty perfect fit for the role, although her acting leaves something to be desired.
Also, how weird is it that there would have been a She-Hulk film before a Hulk film? This isn’t an indictment of the character, or some weird sexist rant, but rather, her name is a derivation of the Hulk, so it would be like having a Wonder Girl movie before a Wonder Woman one.
6. Superman: Flyby
In a script where Krypton not being destroyed is only the second or third weirdest thing, you know you’re in for a shitshow bar none. Let me leave this little nugget from the Wikipedia entry on the film:
Superman is defeated and killed, and visits Jor-El (who committed suicide on Krypton while in prison) in Kryptonian heaven.
Yup, you’ve read that right. This wasn’t a script written by some sad-sack writer trying to break into the biz by being bold, this script was written by J.J. Abrams, post-Alias, pre-LOST. At various times Brett Ratner and McG were signed on to direct, and if you pay attention to things like track record, neither name should inspire too many feelings of hope in you. What might have derailed the production, believe it or not, is McG’s fear of flying that made shooting in Australia untenable. Seriously – a film subtitled “Flyby,” got destroyed by someone refusing to fly.
5. Silver Surfer
Silver Surfer, visually, is a character that has always seemed destined for the screen – the stunning look just screams motion. In the early 1980s, that almost became a reality in a film that would have starred (though not in the titular role) Olivia Newton John and, perhaps, been scored by Paul McCartney.
You see, the idea was to do a rock opera based around the Silver Surfer, with a fanfare made up of “one thousand guitars.” Sadly, the idea never came to pass, as Lee Kramer, the producer of Xanadu and manager of Ms. John, decided to focus on other projects, especially after the poor reception Xanadu got at the box office.
4. Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman
It should come as a surprise to no one that is even remotely familiar with his work that Joss Whedon is known and revered for his portrayal of strong female characters. So, when it was announced that he was working on a Wonder Woman script, it shouldn’t really have been a surprise. In fact, it was one of those ideas that seemed to make so much sense, there was no way it couldn’t succeed.
And then it didn’t succeed.
There are a number of reasons why, but from interviews Whedon has given about the project, Wonder Woman seems, well, weaker and more dependent on a male character than anyone could have expected:
Continued belowShe was a little bit like Angelina Jolie [laughs]. She sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people, and the fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane. And ultimately her romance with Steve [Trevor] was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.
Granted, that is a bad quote, and there is nothing to say that she wouldn’t still be a strong, kick-ass character, but needing a male glyph to unlock the world is a little suspect.
3. Green Arrow: Escape From Super Max
This is one of those bizarre ideas that could either be incredible fun or a horrible mess. Instead of being a simple origin story, this movie would plop Green Arrow mid-superheroics, into a high security prison filled to the brim with supervillains, and needing to escape.
What was interesting about the pitch, beyond just the “why is Green Arrow in prison?” question, was that the villains he’d be encountering would be, at least to pop culture in general, bigger stars than he is. Screenwriter Justin Marks told MTV that the script included Lex Luthor, The Joker, Icicle and the Riddler, among others. But the real star, according to Marks, is the prison itself.
“It’s a very, very awesome prison. I majored in architecture in college, and design is how I actually started in. For ‘Super Max,’ designing that prison, it had to be the kind of thing that was a character in and of itself,” Marks said. “We’re in a world where instead of just trying to contain a guy who’s really big, you’re trying to contain a guy who can — in the case of Icicle — who can freeze things. What kind of a cell would a guy like that need in order to have his powers neutralized? So to escape from Super Max they have got to go through the most elaborate heist we’ve ever seen, involving superpowers. Because the prison itself kind of has superpowers!”
While the film was never officially shitcanned, Arrow has seemed to put a pin the plan. I will say this – if DC ever gets its cinematic universe in Marvel-like shape, this could be a really fun film to put together down the road with Stephen Amell. In fact, Arrow has already introduced a Super Max-like prison in the second season finale.
2. Dazzler
There is an important fact to consider with the proposed Dazzler movie. Well, several really, but here is the big one. The original script (by Jim Shooter) was written for a half-hour animated feature. That is important to know, because when you I share the list of names that Shooter claimed were required to have cameos/roles in the project, it makes slightly more sense if you see them animated:
Robin Williams, Cher, Donna Summer, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny and Squiggy, the Village People and KISS.
Shooter goes into amazing detail over at his website about the project, but let’s just bask in this for a few minutes, and let the information soak in for a few minutes. Can you imagine a more 1979/1980 list of celebrities than that one?
Bo Derek, fresh off of 10, was interested in playing Dazzler (and can be seen here with her husband, who not-so-coincidentally is holding a stack of Marvel comics), but her demands of her husband, John, directing the film, was one of the reasons the film never really came together.
I would still pay a hefty sum to see Rodney Dangerfield walk up to Dazzler while KISS is playing “I Was Made for Loving You” at a roller disco while Robin Williams does blow off of Lenny and Squiggy’s greased up hair. A boy can dream, can’t he?
1. Superman Lives
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – you’ve all heard Kevin Smith talk about it, you’ve all seen (and hopefully backed) the Kickstarter for the full-length documentary about the project, and hopefully seen some of the amazing costumes produced for the film.
In case you haven’t, feast your eyes:
Let’s go through a list of things that would have been part of this incredibly weird Superman movie:
- Brainiac’s space dog
- the Brainiac-spider
- L-Ron, Brainiac robot sidekick, portrayed as “a gay R2-D2 with attitude“
- Polar bears
I really don’t have too much more to add to any of that. Go listen to Smith talk about it, and just imagine how crazy it could have been.
