The name Akiva Goldsman may cause a peristalsis reaction in most comic book fans – 1997’s Batman & Robin anyone?
Whether you hate that film or any other film he has been involved with (Batman Forever, Lost in Space, The Da Vinci Code, I Am Legend, Angels & Demons, Hancock), they never seem to fail from a financial perspective at the box office, so it’s safe to say he’s not going away any time soon.
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he talked about his upcoming film projects, which include three comic book adaptations.
Goldsman wrote the screenplays for the upcoming Jonah Hex, as well as Guy Ritchie’s Lobo, based on DC’s blue-skinned bounty hunter. Fan boys may be pleased to know Goldsman says he has learned something from Batman & Robin, which Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige once dubbed, “the most important comic-book movie ever made.”
“It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do ‘X-Men’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy,” Feige said.
Goldsman admitted he is still answering for that movie with some people.
“What got lost in ‘Batman & Robin’ is the emotions aren’t real,” he said. “The worst thing to do with a serious comic book is to make it a cartoon.”
So he promises Jonah Hex will be faithful to the source material. Of Hex, DC’s scarred anti-hero who’s as at home fighting pistol-toting outlaws as giant sand worms, Goldsman said,
“He’s a character that has been described as having one foot on Earth and one foot beyond the grave, that he speaks to the dead. At the same time he is very much [like Sergio Leone’s] ‘The Man With No Name.'”
Speaking about LOBO, Goldsman said Ritchie will shoot a test scene in November,
“We’ve got the character design pretty much done and the test will get us moving forward to the next step.” Casting will be decided after that.
“There’s something hyperbolic and authentic about a Guy Ritchie movie. His best movie are deeply, deeply stylized yet they are all grounded; there’s a grit of stylization, which sounds like an oxymoron but it makes perfect sense when you’ve seen his films. We’ve never seen Guy’s sensibility married to a project with such a large special effects budget.”
A comic book fan throughout his youth, Goldsman also would like to redeem himself with an adaptation of “Swamp Thing”—specifically, Alan Moore’s beloved run on the title during the 80’s. The character had previously been adapted into a hokey-looking B-film by Wes Craven, but Goldsman promised his version would be different.
“We want a film with real Southern, dark horror overtones, a little bit like a classic Universal horror film,” he said.
