IGN recently caught up with Shane Black to discuss new movie The Nice Guys, and while we had him cornered, we asked about Doc Savage, his forthcoming superhero flick that will star Dwayne Johnson as the title character, and most definitely won’t feature ‘The Man of Bronze’ fighting Al-Qaeda in the present day.
“There’s 182 stories in the original cannon, and I must confess I’ve only read 107 of them” he explained. “That’s going to be a blast… Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry are working on the script with me, just seeing those characters that represented my childhood so vividly come to life in a way that I can control is a dream.”
As for whether it will be a period piece, Black is pretty adamant.
“It has to be. I’m not going to do it otherwise. And if it doesn’t happen for that reason it doesn’t happen. People say ‘Well, we have all these tie-ins we want to do with merchandise and we can’t do them if it’s 1930s, can’t you make it present day? He’ll fight Al-Qaeda.’ No! That’s not who Doc Savage is. What sets him apart is that he was the first of the Supermen. With all the attendant mythology about being trained from birth to be perfect."
One of the original Doc Savage paperbacks.
Black continues: "There’s so much to explore too about a character who is perfect, but who isn’t charming – has no social skills. The things that fascinate him are the things that his father taught him to be fascinated by. So there’s a discipline and an iron rigidity to his existence which he must always be trying to overcome. And a moral quandary because he’s been taught – even though he’s a nice guy essentially – how to fight and kill. He’s a perfect soldier.”
“But beyond it I always laughed when I read them – there’s a lot of humour too. It’s the perfect mythology; superhero-meets-a little bit of the offbeat in that Doc is almost autistic in his inability to fit into society. And then there’s the humour.
“It’s so hard when you have 182 stories to choose from – you’re not going to just pick one. What you do is saturate your mind with as much of that mythology as you can and see what elements prevail. What is the best summation that hopefully scrapes the barrel and gets most of what is the shape that Doc Savage is comprised of. That’s what we’re trying to do – we’ve got our trowels and we’re scraping away.”
Doc Savage is set to shoot after Black has finished The Predator, while The Nice Guys hits UK screens this Friday (June 3), and you can find out why TV executives turned the project down in the below vid...
Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and urges you all to go see The Nice Guys this weekend as it's ace. He can be found talking nonsense on The Superhero Show and Twitter.
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