With reboots all the rage, here’s a bit of incongruity that actually gives us some hope: Deadline reports that Craig Brewer, writer-director of Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan – is developing a trilogy of Tarzan movies for Warner Bros.
Brewer isn’t the only writer developing the property for our modern age, though. Adam Cozad – the guy working on the Jack Ryan reboot along with Archangel, which has Tron: Legacy‘s Joseph Kosinski attached – is working on a version parallel to Brewer’s.
The last time we saw Tarzan – created by venerated pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912 – was in Disney’s animated treatment in 1999. That film wasn’t bad – although lowered expectations from anything Disney-related certainly helped the critical reception at the time. There are no details on Brewer’s approach to the story, but there’s a wealth of source material, from the roughly 25 Tarzan books by Burroughs to the number of authorized and un-authorized Tarzan stories published since Burroughs’s death in 1950.
Commonly held as one of the most recognizable fictional characters of all time, Hollywood has been making Tarzan flicks since 1932, when Johnny Weissmuller first appeared in Tarzan the Ape Man. The last notable live action attempt starred Christopher Lambert and had the helpfully informative title Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
One can only hope that Brewer – perhaps forever infamous for chaining a half-naked Christina Ricci to Samuel J. Jackson‘s radiator in Black Snake Moan – will stay true to the core of the character, whose “preferred dress is a knife and a loincloth of animal hide, his preferred abode is a convenient tree branch which happens to be nearby when he desires to sleep, and his favored food is raw meat, killed by himself; even better if he is able to bury it a week so that putrefaction has had a chance to tenderize it a bit.” Awesome. Let’s see that.
Would you like to see Tarzan rebooted by the Black Snake Moan guy? Seriously, doesn’t that sound pretty cool?