The game is on again.
Almost 20 years after Hollywood first attempted to turn Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill brilliant comics series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into a movie, they’re going to try it one more time.
(Also: How has it been 20 years since the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie?!? That is wild.)
Deadline reports that 20th Century Studios — the vestiges of Fox, which made the original League film — is working on a reboot of the concept specifically for the Hulu streaming service. They don’t have too many other details beyond the name of the writer working on the script: Justin Haythe.
Moore and O’Neill’s comic book imagined a sort of Justice League of famous Victorian heroes —the literary version of an enormous cinematic universe years before that was a thing in movies. The original lineup included Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Allan Quartermain, Dr. Jekyll, and Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The film version, directed by Blade’s Stephen Norrington, was largely faithful to the concept, but it dumbed Moore’s plots and characters down significantly — as evidenced by the fact that the movie was given a “cool” acronym in most of its marketing, which referred to it not as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but just LXG. The big-screen team included Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer.
At least according to legend, the shoot was such a miserable experience for Sean Connery, playing Allan Quatermain, that it was a big contributing factor to his decision to retire from acting. Either way, Connery never appeared in another live-action movie after LXG prior to his death in October of 2020.
The premise has an enormous amount of potential — although if you asked me, I would think it’s better suited to a prestige TV series than a movie. The LXG movie was bad, but how could it not be? Very few comic book movies are as literate, clever, complex, and adult as Moore and O’Neill’s comics, especially at the budget you need to pull of the epic scale of the League’s globe-trotting adventures. A show would be better suited to the comic’s serialized nature, and to the fact that Moore and O’Neill made numerous volumes of The League, which would each lend themselves to separate seasons. Doesn’t that sound like a Hulu show? It does to me.
Every DC Comics Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best
From Superman and the Mole Men to The Suicide Squad, we ranked every movie based on DC comics.
