Get off je shtreetsh of Venish, ash the league will finally be back! Fox just announced a second adaptation of Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Chronicle and Predators producer John Davis will reboot 2003’s infamous movie that had Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man (no, wait: just “an” Invisible Man, they didn’t have the rights for “The Invisible Man”), Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Tom Sawyer, and Dorian Gray fight a mysterious villain named The Phantom.
The movie – a sort of proto-Avengers – isn’t actually that bad, but it’s infamous for three major happenings. For one, it was Sean Connery’s last movie. Secondly, the production frustrated Blade director Stephen Norrington so hard that he swore to never make another movie. And thirdly, it happened to be the first major backlash against Richard Roxburgh before he hammed it up again in 2004’s Van Helsing, thus becoming geekdom’s most hated for a while. Did I mention that it was released on the same weekend as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl? That had to hurt.
Norrington’s movie had some usable elements for intentionally schlocky b-action fare, such as Connery’s hunter character, Jason Flemyng’s Dr. Jekyll, and the completely bonkers action scenes that included racing a prototype car down Venice’s non-existing streets, but the rest of the cast was rather weak, and it failed anytime it tried to come off as cool. Which happened way too often.