Paramount Pictues has set The Accountant helmer Gavin O’Connor to direct a big screen reboot of The Green Hornet, which “will overhaul the image of Britt Reid into an edgy protagonist capable of being the catalyst for a new franchise.”
Created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, The Green Hornet follows Britt Reid, wealthy publisher by day and vigilante by night, who fights crime with his sidekick and confidant Kato. Launching as a radio serial in the 1930s, The Green Hornet was adapted as a TV series in 1966, starring Van Williams as Britt Reid and Bruce Lee as Kato. After many years in development, a Green Hornet movie was released in 2011, with Michel Gondry directing Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as the two masked crime-fighters.
“I’ve been wanting to make this movie — and create this franchise — since I’ve wanted to make movies,” said O’Connor. “As a kid, when most of my friends were into Superman and Batman, there was only one superhero who held my interest — The Green Hornet. I always thought he was the baddest badass because he had no superpowers. The Green Hornet was a human superhero. And he didn’t wear a clown costume. And he was a criminal — in the eyes of the law — and in the eyes of the criminal world. So all this felt real to me. Imagine climbing to the top of the Himalayas, or Mount Everest, or K2 over and over again and no one ever knew? You can never tell anybody. That’s the life of Britt and Kato. What they do, they can never say. They don’t take credit for anything.”
“For almost 20 years now I’ve been tracking the rights, watching from the sidelines as they were optioned by one studio or another,” he continued. “When I discovered the rights were available again, I tracked them down, partnered with Peter Chernin and we set the movie up at Paramount. With the rights now in our loving hands, I’m beyond excited to bring The Green Hornet into the 21st century in a meaningful and relevant way; modernizing it and making it accessible to a whole new generation. My intention is to bring a gravitas to The Green Hornet that wipes away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration. I want to re-mythologize The Green Hornet in a contemporary context, with an emphasis on story and character, while at the same time, incorporating themes that speak to my heart. The comic book movie is the genre of our time. How do we look at it differently? How do we create a distinctive film experience that tells itself differently than other comic book movies? How do we land comfortably at the divide between art and industry? How do we go deeper, prompt more emotion? How do we put a beating heart into the character that was never done before? These are my concerns…these are my desires, my intentions, my fears, my goals.”
The Green Hornet will be written by Sean O’Keefe, who has recently penned a script for a Watch Dogs adaptation for Ubisoft, Sony and New Regency, and also has a remake of The Escapist in development with Liam Neeson circling the lead.
Originally published November 16, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
