Tom Hiddleston may have shot to fame as Loki in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, but he’s definitely no one comic book man. Deadline reports that the popular actor has signed on to star in a feature film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled comic, which will be written and directed by Ben Wheatley for Warner Bros.
The Brit filmmaker built up quite the fanbase with cult fave hits like Kill List and Sightseers, and even already directed Hiddleston in the great High Rise earlier this year. This new project will be quite the deviation from their previous collaboration though. Released in 1990 by Dark Horse Comics, Hard Boiled (no relation to the classic John Woo action movie) is a three issue comic miniseries written by the legendary Frank Miller (Sin City, The Dark Knight Returns, 300) and drawn by Geoff Darrow, and it’s kind of bonkers. Here’s the official blurb for the dystopian sci-fi tale:
Carl Seltz is a suburban insurance investigator, a loving husband, and devoted father. Nixon is a berserk, homicidal tax collector racking up mind-boggling body counts in a diseased urban slaughterhouse. Unit Four is the ultimate robot killing machine — and the last hope of the future’s enslaved mechanical servants. And they’re all the same psychotic entity.
Like, I said: Bonkers. Which is kind of like this movie’s development. Warner Bros. has been trying to get Hard Boiled made since 2001, with David Fincher once set to direct while Nicholas Cage starred (this might actually have been a role suited to Cage’s manic acting), but they eventually exited. Then Miller himself planned to take on the directing reins but that also didn’t pan out. Before this latest update, Vehicle 19 director Mukunda Michael Dewil was actually supposed to helm.
Hopefully this new team of Wheatley and Hiddleston can actually be the ones who finally get this film going. Both men certainly have the talent to make this one hell of a crazy ride, and I would actually be pretty stoked to see what they can do with it. Wheatley has been hanging at the fringes of truly big stardom for a while now. Critics love his work, and he has a devout fanbase, but he’s not quite at household name status yet. I’m not sure that this will be the movie to do that, since it will probably end up being too extreme for the mainstream, but it should at least get him noticed by even more people. Well, that’s if the upcoming Free Fire doesn’t do that already.
Last Updated: November 24, 2016
