The Four Color Media Monitor

According to this history item at the UK Independent, the 2003 movie based on one of Alan Moore's GNs was such a botch it may have made the late Connery, most famous for his roles as James Bond decades prior, retire from acting:

"I’m fed up with the idiots," Sean Connery once said, upon announcing he was quitting Hollywood. “The ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who greenlight the movies.” This was in 2005, two years after the release of what would end up his final film: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic-book adaptation so cursed that the history-making floods that derailed its production may have been nature’s way of telling everyone involved that trouble was afoot.

It’s been 20 years since the League assembled, Avengers-style. That was the idea, at least. Based on the comic-book series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill, it’s a riff on the traditional superhero team-up story. But instead of superheroes, The League is comprised of a collection of Victorian literary characters, all of whom band together to save the world. Like The Avengers, the film was also an attempt at kickstarting a mega-franchise. But due to its troubled journey to the screen and all-round critical shoeing, it never happened.

[...] The original LXG comic was first published in 1999. Film producer Don Murphy heard about it while on the phone to Alan Moore himself. At the time, Murphy was developing another adaptation of Moore’s work – his Jack the Ripper graphic novel, From Hell, which would ultimately be made with stars Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. Moore – who also wrote the seminal Watchmen and V for Vendetta – is notoriously grumpy about adaptations of his comics (“I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work,” he told GQ last year. “From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing.”) Still, Murphy took the idea to 20th Century Fox. The studio head loved it. “It became this project that you always knew was going to get made because the idea was such a crazy but original good one,” Murphy said in a making-of documentary.

Like Moore’s other work, there is an air of highfalutin smugness about the original comic. Though it’s brilliant, of course – rich with commentary on colonialism, suffragettes, industrial scale arms, and 19th-century sleaze. The film version, adapted by British comics writer James Robinson, was inevitably dumbed down – a by-the-numbers, getting-the-band-together origin tale. This was a time when the average CGI-powered blockbuster was only as deep as its new-fangled computer effects. And lots of them were very average in the late Nineties and early Noughties: the Mummy films, Wild Wild West, Pearl Harbor, Men in Black II and the Star Wars prequels, to name just a handful.

Oh, do they mean the disgrace of a scribe who retconned Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott into a homosexual? That's enough to make me feel glad I never wasted money on the movie myself at theaters. In retrospect, Robinson's Starman series was overrated too. That aside, interesting how there's comics writers who've journeyed to Hollywood, Geoff Johns being one of the most notorious (and more recently, Greg Rucka went there too), and almost none of them have proven up to the task of scriptwriting for something much bigger than the printed page. So why does Hollywood keep hiring them, if they still do? A pure waste of resources.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen certainly had money-spinning potential. Comic book movies were the hot new trend, and director Norrington should have been a sure bet. His Blade was – Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films aside – the slickest of the pre-MCU Marvel movies. LXG was also a major production, costing a reported $75-$95m. Based mainly in Prague, the production built recreations of Venice – “brick-by-brick” says Flemying – and Nairobi, with livestock, actors, and everything else flown in. “The size of that film… it was the kind of thing I always dreamt about making,” he adds. But that came with big problems. “This was a big studio movie with a lot of interference and a lot of politics.”

I guess that makes for an important lesson what's gone wrong with major studios. If it were filmed today, it'd probably be a lot more woke than it could've been 2 decades back. According to the following, it's not clear if Connery quit because the film was a catastrophe, but what's said about director Stephen Norrington is telling:

But did it really make Connery quit acting? “I don’t think that’s true,” says Townsend. “His passion had definitely left him by that stage. That was a money gig.” It is true, though, that Norrington hasn’t directed a feature film since.

Presumably, because the movie did so badly, nobody in the higher echelons considered Norrington a guaranteed success at bringing in the masses. If his career was shuttered as a result of this folm, it's too bad, but in the past, that's how Hollywood could go about.

Labels: history, msm propaganda