CBS Films needs a hit. Badly.
The new movie studio stumbled out of the gate with commercial duds like “Faster,” “Extraordinary Measures,” “The Back-Up Plan” and “The Mechanic.”
So now they’re doing what any clear thinking studio should have done a while ago, making a movie about a terrorist hunter. Two, in fact.
The studio just announced Oscar-winner Edward Zwick (“The Last Samurai,” “Defiance”) will direct the screen adaptation of Vince Flynn’s “American Assassin.” The novel turns back the clock on hero Mitch Rapp, exploring his first foray into battling Middle Eastern baddies. It’s the second Rapp film in development at the fledgling studio.
Up until now, the War on Terror hasn’t exactly inspired Hollywood scribes. Frankly, the film industry is leaving a lot of money on the table as a result.
When the United States went to war in the 1940s, Hollywood responded with a flotilla of films celebrating the country’s fighting men. Even Abbott and Costello got into the act via their “Buck Privates” features.
Yes, some post 9/11 films have delved into terrorism, like the 2008 hit “Vantage Point.” But very few take the subject head on, like the excellent Middle Eastern actioner “The Kingdom.,” the exception proving the rule. We’ve yet to see a single film showcasing a U.S. soldier battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Will the Rapp films cause a sea change in thinking among Hollywood producers?
“American Assassin” recalls CIA agent Mitch Rapp’s formative years as a college scholar and athlete who first gets recruited to become a covert op.
“The Mitch Rapp novels are as thrilling and entertaining as they are relevant,” said Zwick, an openly liberal director, in a statement.
CBS Films, which controls the rights to the Rapp series as well as any sequels, is currently developing another Mitch Rapp novel, “Consent to Kill,” for the big screen. Flynn has written 11 Rapp novels, so the film studio could have a genuine franchise on its hands.
And, if these films make a mint at the box office, other studios might finally realize there’s a profit to be made in showing the U.S. in a heroic fashion.
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Whaatt?! This is HUGE! Flynn has said for years he’s tried to get his book made to movies but the tide was against him. I had accepted that we would never see movies like this made, despite the raging popularity of this character. If they do this right, this could be an entire genre/series in the James Bond vein. Cool!
We’ve yet to see a single film showcasing a U.S. soldier battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Didn’t Derek Luke and Michael Pena fight the Taliban during their big action scene in “Lions for Lambs?”
Bam!
‘Bout time.
Scott – you are correct, but that was a sequence of scenes in a film dedicated to speaking out against that military conflict and others, too. They were made out to be victims, first and foremost.
Mitch Rapp fights evil Neo-Nazi’s who use the “Tea Party” to secretly plot against American president Barack Obama, and who spread anti-immigrant, anti-union, and islamophobic plots. There you go, everything as it should be.
Acceptable Hollywood bad guys:
Nazis
Neo-Nazis
The Russian mob
North Korea
Fictional Eastern European/Central Asian country, possibly ending in “-istan”
Fictional South American dictator
The CIA or a stand-in
U.S. military leadership
Blackwater or a stand-in
Conservative politicians
Multi-national corporations
International banks
Unacceptable Hollywood bad guys:
Muslim countries
Muslims
China
Real South American dictator
European countries
Communists (other than Soviet era Russians)
Unions
The mainstream media
Hailstate:
You forgot these Hollywood villains:
The Italian Mob
Christians
This isn’t as exciting as it may appear.
Govindini Murty over at Libertas points out that Director Zwick is a hard left liberal who will also be in charge of writing the screenplay. IOWs he’s going to make it completely his. “Sum of All Fears” or “Starship Troopers” anyone?
http://tinyurl.com/42atg5s
Starship Troopers was a travesty, and I don’t even really like Heinlein. The same thing happened when they made an anime of Fullmetal Alchemist—the guy who adapted the comic was a 9/11 Truther (he also wrote the infamously anti-Semitic “Angel Cop” back in the 80s). But that, unusually, was eventually corrected, with a second series that followed the comic (the actual war the original author was commenting on was World War II, not Iraq, for instance).
I doubt that’ll happen here; Hollywood’s a lot more lockstep than the Japanese entertainment industry. If Flynn’s movie rights deal didn’t have him keeping a major level of creative control, I predict, like K, that this’ll be Sum of All Fears all over again. Or maybe more like V for Vendetta: Alan Moore always hates it when his comics are adapted to movies, but he was very specific in that instance that the Wachowskis were distorting it for cheap partisan potshots. And Moore’s an anarchist, so too left-wing for him is saying something.
Dear God. Placing Ed Zwick in charge of a movie like this is like having Michael Moore do a documentary on Reagan. It’s madness.
So hello Ed Zwick, goodbye all references to Patriotism, Love of Country, and the evils of Islamo-Nazi terror.
The bad guys will be White Christians who will be semi-Klan guys intent on “framing innocent Muslims.” There, easy prediction.
Come to think of it, if we lived in an apolitical world, “guy uses terrorists as cover for nefarious deeds” could actually be a really cool plot. But since the entire Democratic Party, plus some more isolationist elements of the Republican party, actually believe that that’s happening, it’s aiding-and-abetting to make a movie like that. Similarly, “some huge act of mass murder was completely faked” would be an awesome plot: but there really are Holocaust deniers and 9/11 Truthers in the world, so it’d be a bad idea to make that movie, too.
It was a cool plot, when it was used in the more-or-less apolitical Die Hard in 1988. But these days, even ignoring the horrible politics that tend to drive the contemporary use of such plots, they are completely played out. Want a twist that will genuinely surprise your audience? Well, try ‘the apparent islamist terrorists turn out to be actual islamist terrorists, and those hunting them have no hidden agenda’. Nobody in the audience will be expecting that.
While I liked The Mechanic, I have little faith in CBS putting out anything “Pro American”.
Well, I would think how close the end product resembles what Mr. Flynn wrote would depend on what kind of contract he negotiated with CBS about the book rights.
Everyone’s fears might be calmed if Vince still has some say about the final product.