There are a lot of folks who think the whole superhero movie thing has run its course. My buddy and colleague Brandon Morse has done a lot of reporting and offered up a lot of opinions on this topic, and I tend to take him seriously, as he watches these things more closely than I do. He suspects that the public's attendance at superhero movies during the glory days of Marvel from "Iron Man" (2008) to "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) was an outlier, and that the decline in ticket sales is not solely because Marvel went woke, but because viewership in the genre is returning to its pre-Tony Stark norm. He may well be right.
But I think there may be some rubber left on these wheels yet.
There are three ideas I'd like to propose. Two were (Yes, I know) Saturday morning cartoon shows, but from back in the '60s, before these things got so annoyingly woke. The other was the subject of a bunch of pulp novels and a bunch of comic books. All would, I think, make great movies. Let's pile in.
1) Jonny Quest. This old Hanna-Barbera cartoon ran in 1964 and 1965, bringing us the adventures of the young Jonny Quest, his brilliant polymath father Dr. Benton Quest, his buddy Hadji, and the ever-present, always-reliable bodyguard, pilot, and all-around badass Race Bannon. Oh, and we can't forget Bandit, that oddly generic little white dog with a black mask over his eyes, as though a raccoon had somehow snuck into his lineage somewhere. I won't hazard a guess as to casting for this one, but I'm picturing a kind of Indiana Jones-style globetrotting adventure, with bad guys, treasure, intrigue, tricks, traps, desperate situations, and thrilling escapes. Maybe in the post-credit scene, someone could finally explain what happened to Jonny's mother.
There have been murmurs of a live-action Jonny Quest movie for some years, and one report has Dwayne Johnson cast as Race Bannon. There are reports of a script - but you can color me skeptical. That's too bad, because this would be a fun film, done properly.
2) Space Ghost. Another Saturday morning product of Hanna-Barbera, Space Ghost originally aired in 1966 and 1967. His origins are unclear, as are the sources of his abilities; he can fly, for example, but it's not clear whether that ability is innate or a product of his suit. His iconic black, white, and yellow outfit includes a belt of invisibility, along with wrist bands that enabled him to shoot blasts of fire, ice, nuclear power, butterflies and kittens, or whatever else he seemed to need at any given moment. He was super-strong and super-fast and could handle pretty much any situation, which makes it all the more puzzling that he dragged around two teenagers, Jan and Jace, and a... monkey?
This could be a great galaxy-spanning romp on the order of "Galaxy Quest" or "Guardians of the Galaxy." Semi-satirical, plenty of inside jokes, maybe have Space Ghost, at the end of the film, getting a call from a TV producer proposing him as a TV talk-show host. Not all that long ago, I would have loved to have seen Patrick Warburton in this role, but I expect he's a little long in the tooth for it now.
3) Doc Savage. The Man of Bronze was one of my favorites as a kid. My Dad collected the old Lester Dent novels, and I spent a lot of time absorbing the adventures of Clark Savage Jr. and his five amazing companions. He maintained a secret headquarters on the 86th floor of a "famous New York skyscraper," supposedly the Empire State Building, along with hidden outposts around the world. He and his men, using aircraft, vehicles, and weapons of Doc's design, roamed the world, finding evildoers and giving them their quietus.
This one I'd like to see set in today's world, a gritty action film along the lines of "The Expendables," a gritty, tough action thriller of a band of heroes, going toe-to-toe with bad guys, let's say an army of jihadis looking to invade and brutalize a small, inoffensive, defenseless border nation. Maybe Tom Hardy as Clark Savage Jr.?
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Honestly, of these three, only Space Ghost really counts as a "superhero." Jonny Quest, his father and their traveling companions were just people; brilliant, brave, tough, and talented, but people. Clark Savage Jr. seems not to have been entirely human, but he was mortal. Space Ghost, though, it's not at all clear exactly what he was. Was he human? Or something else? Was he just posing as a man? Or was he a man of some unknown future?
For folks around my age, these were all shows that still bring back great memories - afternoons with a cheap paperback, or Saturday morning in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. They've been ignored by the moviemakers in Tinseltown. Maybe it's time some producer gave them a look, preferably some non-woke producer who wouldn't screw it all up by casting an overweight black woman to play Doc Savage or replacing the Jonny Quest team with a quartet of green-haired non-binary three-spirit wood nymphs.
