Earlier this week, ComingSoon.net/Superhero Hype! spent some time in London visiting a location where Guy Ritchie was shooting his new version of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. as the 19th Century detective and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. While there, we did a bunch of interviews with the producers of the movie, including Dark Castle’s Joel Silver and Susan Downey, who updated us on some of the projects they’d been developing with Ritchie which were put aside to do Sherlock Holmes. One of them was a movie based on the war comic hero Sgt. Rock, and Silver broke to us that Dark Castle would also be taking over The Losers.
Silver talked to us a little bit about Ritchie’s planned war movie based on Sgt. Rock, which has been temporarily backburnered. “Guy did a great job on the script for ‘Sgt. Rock’ and I think that when (Quentin Tarantino’s) ‘Inglourious Basterds’ was coming together so quickly, it made sense to kind of jump off that and jump onto this, because it was something that was really different and unique. I loved to think that one day we will make ‘Sgt. Rock.’ ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is a war movie and I’m looking forward to seeing it, but it’s something that was a direct competition to ‘Sgt. Rock’ so I felt that we should hold off and do that when we can.”
“Those two projects specifically, they still need more work in development,” Downey agreed. “I know that Guy, he still has passion for them, but his focus right now is on this. I do believe that if there was a universe where he could be doing them all right now. He would want to, and we haven’t jumped off him and looked for other people yet either. I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do, because we love those projects but they have to be done right, which is the other reason why we haven’t moved forward even with him, because we’ve got scripts that were good but they hadn’t landed just yet.”
Silver also mentioned that he’s looking to get on board to co-produce a movie based on the Vertigo comic book The Losers, which at one point director Tim Story was involved in making. “I’ve always liked that project, it was a competing project with ‘Dirty Dozen’ for a while, but it didn’t happen at Warners, so we kind of took it into Dark Castle, so we may try to make that now. But I hope to do ‘Dirty Dozen’ one day, too. I always look at these things that there’s a lot of time, a lot of movies to make. Sometimes the time is right for them and sometimes you have to wait to make them for another time.” (Ironically, as we were waiting for permission to run this story, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Sylvain White would direct, which you can read about here.)
Before we left, Silver was asked about whether Wonder Woman was still a priority to which he said, “They’ve talked about it. It’s been in a constant state of development; we’ve just not been able to find the right way to do it yet.â€
Source: Edward Douglas
