The Planet of the Apes franchise seems to be in good hands these days, and now it seems that Steve Austin will be getting his chance at a resurgence of his own. Peter Berg is set to direct Mark Wahlberg in The Six Billion Dollar Man. I hope to learn more about the project, because both have had recent missteps with the sci-fi/action genre - Berg with Battleship and Wahlberg with the last Transformers. Let's hope a little more care is put into the Bionic Man's big screen debut.
Peter Berg is a pretty competent director. We're mining comic books, amusement park rides, board games and old toy lines for original film concepts. The biggest fault of films like Schumacher's Batman films is that story was replaced by merchandising.
ReplyDeleteBattleship was a mindless summer blockbuster.
I haven't seen Transformers 4 yet, but I would imagine it is the same thing.
I've been disappointed hearing that Jim Carrey and Chris Rock have been attached to a SMDM reboot. I'm tired of old television programs brought to the big screen as too dark or too comedy. I don't want to see Col. Steve Austin played for laughs. I don't want to see it bogged down as too serious either. I want it to be fun!
I'm betting six million wouldn't even pay for the microprocessor that runs his prosthetics, never mind the prosthetics themselves.
ReplyDeleteSteve Austin being hunted on any of the cinematic versions of the Planet of the Apes would be a story well worth reading. Nice match-up, Ross!
ReplyDelete"You maniacs! You blew it up!"
ReplyDelete"We can rebuild it. We have the technology."
Thanks, Bob G!
ReplyDeleteWorks Perfectly, Bob B!
Considering all the shark-jumping the original show did, in its final season, I would not consider it implausible for Steve to have wound up going through some chronospatial anomaly (like the Bermuda Triangle) and winding up in the 31st century. Preferably alongside like Verdon, Burke, and Galen!*
ReplyDelete*Anyone else out there old enough to remember the one-season POTA series, on CBS, circa 1975?
@Anonymous: I remember the live-action TV series and had the trading cards made from them, not the movies. I also remember an animated series that ran in syndication. And the Mego figures. (My neighbor had the playset.) Weirdly, I never got the comics or the Power Records.
ReplyDelete@AirDave: Any modern movie about a man with prosthetic limbs in a world were body augmentation is rapidly becoming the norm is going to look like that scene in the Salkind Superman movie where Clark looks for a phone booth to change in and finds a bank of pay phones on posts because even back in 1978 nobody had built a phone booth in over a decade. Now imagine that scene spread out for two hours. And paying to see it. I don't know if the movie will ever get made but I'm not surprised that only comedians would say "I could work with that."
How about The Bionic Woman and Knight-Wing Restorations vs the Cybermen? (And I'm still waiting on anything from The Wild Wild West - TV show, not movie).
ReplyDeleteHmmm... The Wild Wild West meets Austin Powers, maybe? Dr. Miguelito Loveless teams up with Mini-Me?
ReplyDelete@ Air Dave: I preferred those open-air pay phones, myself. The glass-enclosed ones always made me paranoid that some lead-footed driver of a black, four-door sedan was going to come straight for me.*
ReplyDelete*In fact, during the Eighties, that was kind of a drinking game, at colleges, whenever students watched a cop show on TV. Wolfing down shots of whiskey every time some penny-ante stool pigeon enters a glass phone booth, in the middle of the night, only to get run over!
COVER OF THE MONTH!
ReplyDeleteThis crossover should include bionic Bigfoot and his alien masters.
ReplyDeleteThis is a awesome cover! Wish it was a real comic book or a TV show.
ReplyDelete@LEL: I'd prefer a sequel featuring the $6,000,000 Man vs. the Gargoyles (from the 1970's TV-movie of the same name).
ReplyDelete