Guillermo Del Toro may be up to his eyeballs in giant beasts of destruction over on his Pacific Rim set, but there’s another destructive beast that’s been eagerly waiting some TLC from the popular Mexican director.
We’ve been hearing for ages about how his Hulk live action TV series has been in development, but there didn’t seem to actually be much of it. Development, that is. But now Del Toro has sat down with Collider to talk about it, and reveals that he’s just been waiting for the right man.
When asked about the status of the series, as well as how the massive success of The Avengers may have helped to spur things along, Del Toro had this say:
“I had one meeting with Marvel after Avengers and we had a very, very good chat. We have a writer that we want to bring on board, a very, very concrete name. I can’t reveal it, but we want to wait for that writer. It’s a writer who is otherwise engaged. So right now we are in a holding pattern until that writer becomes free. Then we’re going to do a new draft of the script.”
The Not-So-Jolly Green Giant is not the only comic book character that Del Toro has been approached with, though he’d be the first to tell you that he’s actually a very unlikely choice for this kind of stuff:
‘The thing is that I’m not a superhero guy. I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it’s a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously. I loved when the superhero genre crosses with horror. Morbius. Those are the guys I gravitated towards. Blade. So for me, to be interested in doing a superhero movie, it would need to be on the dark side or a Jack Kirby property. Kamandi, Demon, Mr. Miracle—I love any Kirby.”
“…I came very close to doing Thor because I really wanted to bring the Norse mythology… It’s something I’m very attracted to. Create the giants and create the more fantastical version of that. But it’s not like I have many meetings with studios discussing superhero movies. They come to me. Normally I pass, respectfully or not. They like it, that we have a very quick response. I was very attracted to doing The Wolverine in Japan, because that’s my favorite chapter in the story of Wolverine. But I’m not a superhero guy. It’s very hard for me to… It’s one thing to like something and another to marry it for two, three years.”
“I spoke to [Fox executive] Jim Gianopulos a while ago. I thought about it. I actually met with Hugh Jackman. But it’s one thing to say… You have to differentiate between loving it as a fan, which is almost like dating, and creating it from scratch, which takes two to three years of your life, which is like a marriage.”
While I don’t think that Del Toro would have been a good fit for The Wolverine, it would have been interesting to see which direction he took Thor into. Actual Thor director Kenneth Branagh clearly drew on his Shakespearean background which is why the tale ended up being so much of a family tragedy, but with Del Toro we would have probably headed more into the Norse side of things: Sutur, Hela, Bor, etc. Tonally, it might not have been as good a fit with the rest of the Marvel universe as Branagh’s film ended up being (also that film gave us Tom Hiddleston, which is something I will always be grateful for), but it would certainly have made for some memorable visuals.
As for Hulk, while it’s not exactly the news of development we were hoping for, at least we now know that the series hasn’t stalled completely, but that they’re rather just waiting for the appropriate players to take their places. Which is something that I’m perfectly OK with.
Last Updated: August 7, 2012
