Atomic Romance

Hey remember when there was all that buzz floating around about Marvel working on a Deathlok movie...? No? Well I sure did as he is one of my favorite characters (at least the original Luther Manning version is...) anyhoo, yes they WERE working on a Deathlok movie and Paul McGuigan was going to be the director. Here's the scoop from this i09 article

Finally, I asked McGuigan about those internet rumors that he was working on a movie based on Deathlok, Marvel Comics' cyborg character. "It wasn't a rumor, it was true," says McGuigan. He'd been working with Marvel and writer David Self on a Deathlok movie, but then Marvel put it on the back burner. "I was really into it, but Marvel changed their mind."

McGuigan got pretty excited about working on Deathlok, and he has all of the character's back comics. The biggest challenge in doing a Deathlok film would have been the fact that the killer cyborg is always having conversations with his on-board computer. "In a way it felt like Knight Rider, where you have the machine talking to him." It would have been a challenge to make that work on screen. "The script was really good. David Self is no slouch, he's a great screenwriter. And the whole idea of nanotechnology was fasinating." The movie included a "weird professor" character, who created Deathlok because he wanted to go down in history as another Da Vinci. (And McGuigan had envisioned Robert Downey Jr. for that character, which would have been a very different role than Tony Stark.)

"It would have been a good movie," he adds. "Maybe they'll still make it with somebody else."

It looks like it wouldn't have been set in a near apocalyptic future as the original Astonishing Tales comics were, which I think is the best way to do a Deathlok film, but now it doesn't matter I guess.


-Swinebread