Movies that were supposed to launch franchises (but didn’t): The Spirit
Frank Miller is unquestionably one of the most influential comic book writers of all times. Just about every big-screen version of Batman owes a debt to Miller’s seminal stories about the Dark Knight. For decades, Miller tried to move from comics to movies.
Ten years ago, as Marvel was starting their cinematic universe and Christopher Nolan made superheroes respectable with The Dark Knight, Miller got his chance to make a movie that was near and dear to his heart. The Spirit was Miller’s passion project. It was also a disaster.
Unless you are a fan of comic book history, you may not be familiar with Will Eisner’s creation, The Spirit. Eisner is generally considered one of the great innovators of sequential art (aka comics). In 1940, Eisner created a comic strip starring Denny Colt, a detective who is presumed dead. To protect his identity, Colt fights crime wearing a domino mask as The Spirit. He’s basically the pulp crime Lone Ranger.
There have been several attempts to adapt Eisner’s character into other media. When Batman, Superman and Captain America were starring in their own movie serials, the Spirit sat on the sidelines. In 1987, Sam Jones (best known for playing Flash Gordon) starred in a TV movie that was intended to serve as the pilot for a TV show that never got picked up. This was two years before Tim Burton’s Batman, so that probably gives you some idea what it was like.
As far back as the 1970’s, Hollywood showed interest in The Spirit as a movie star. Director William Friedkin tried to collaborate with Eisner on a movie script, but Eisner declined. A pre-Pixar Brad Bird who later went on to create The Incredibles developed an animated Spirit movie that was ultimately scrapped.
In 2005, following the death of Will Eisner, producer Michael Uslan approached Frank Miller at a memorial service for the iconic artist. Initially, Miller turned down the offer to write and direct a big-screen adaptation of Eisner’s comic strip. But he changed his mind very quickly.
Miller became a superstar comic book artist in the 1980’s with his work on Daredevil and Batman. Along with creators like Alan Moore, Miller helped usher in dark and gritty superheroes. In the 1990’s, Miller focused primarily on independent comic books like Sin City and 300.
Around the same time, Miller got his first taste of Hollywood. He wrote the screenplays for the two Robocop sequels. While the material played to several of Miller’s strengths, both movies bombed at the box office. Conventional wisdom among fans was that Hollywood had messed up Miller’s scripts, but the studios weren’t willing to give a comic book artist any more chances.
That changed when two movies based on Miller’s indie comics became surprise hits. Robert Rodriquez enlisted Miller to co-direct his adaptation of Sin City in 2005 and Zack Snyder had a hit the following year with a movie based on 300. Both movies were unusually faithful to the source material and both used green screens to create heavily stylized visuals.
With back-to-back successes under his belt, Hollywood was willing to give Miller another chance. It didn’t matter that Miller had never actually directed a movie himself or that the only two movies he had written were box office disappointments.
On the surface, a pulp hero like The Spirit seems like a good fit for a hard boiled writer like Miller. But Eisner’s brand of pulp was very different from the kind of stories Miller liked to tell. In a Frank Miller comic, all the women are prostitutes and most of them end up dead. The guys are usually tough-talkin’ sociopaths. Eisner’s Spirit was a brightly-colored boy scout by comparison.
Miller clearly made an effort to stay true to the source material in certain superficial ways. He used green screens to recreate panels of the original comic strip just as Rodriguez and Snyder had done. But in most of the ways that mattered, Miller turned The Spirit into a Frank Miller creation. Sadly by this point, Miller had lost touch.
Something seemed to happen to Miller as a result of 9/11. He spent several years working on a Batman comic book in which the Dark Knight would fight Al-Qaeda. Originally, the project was titled Holy Terror, Batman but DC Comics balked at the overtly racist content. So Miller changed the lead character to a Batman rip-off named The Fixer and published the book himself.
Holy Terror was denounced by just about everybody when it was finally released in 2011. By then, Miller had descended into crankiness. After the failure of The Spirit, Hollywood lost his number. Marvel and DC no longer trusted Miller to handle their intellectual property.
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