THE GREEN HORNET is Getting Rebooted by THE ACCOUNTANT Director
I remember kind of liking Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet when it came out back in 2011, but even just a few years later, the film has largely been forgotten. It's one of the few superhero franchises of the past decade that didn't launch a franchise, but Paramount isn't content with letting the property sit on a shelf and collect dust when there's the possibility of money to be made.
Deadline reports that the studio has acquired the rights to Green Hornet after they lapsed following Sony's 2011 film, and they've now hired Gavin O'Connor (The Accountant, Warrior) to direct "a film that will overhaul the image of Britt Reid into an edgy protagonist capable of being the catalyst for a new franchise." Sean O’Keefe will write the screenplay. O'Connor certainly loves the characters, as evidenced by his quotes to the site:
“I’ve been wanting to make this movie— and create this franchise— since I’ve wanted to make movies,” O’Connor said. “As a kid, when most of my friends were into Superman and Batman, there was only one superhero who held my interest — The Green Hornet. I always thought he was the baddest badass because he had no superpowers. The Green Hornet was a human superhero. And he didn’t wear a clown costume. And he was a criminal — in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the criminal world. So all this felt real to me. Imagine climbing to the top of the Himalayas, or Mount Everest, or K2 over and over again and no one ever knew? You can never tell anybody. That’s the life of Britt and Kato. What they do, they can never say. They don’t take credit for anything.”
“For almost twenty years now I’ve been tracking the rights, watching from the sidelines as they were optioned by one studio or another. When I discovered the rights were available again, I tracked them down, partnered with Peter Chernin and we set the movie up at Paramount. With the rights now in our loving hands, I’m beyond excited to bring The Green Hornet into the 21st century in a meaningful and relevant way; modernizing it and making it accessible to a whole new generation. My intention is to bring a gravitas to The Green Hornet that wipes away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration. I want to re-mythologize The Green Hornet in a contemporary context, with an emphasis on story and character, while at the same time, incorporating themes that speak to my heart. The comic book movie is the genre of our time. How do we look at it differently? How do we create a distinctive film experience that tells itself differently than other comic book movies? How do we land comfortably at the divide between art and industry? How do we go deeper, prompt more emotion? How do we put a beating heart into the character that was never done before? These are my concerns…these are my desires, my intentions, my fears, my goals.”
Well, he definitely has a lot of ambition, and I'll be interested to see if he can pull this off.
What do you think? Are you ready for another Green Hornet movie?