Is the Justin Marks train going to fly off the rails by Sunday, when the tallies for Fox’s Street Fighter film, for which he wrote the script, all come in? I keep hearing from certain geek circles that Marks, who wrote the Greyskull script as well as Hack/Slash, SuperMax and the McG 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is some sort of grandly entertaining wizard who can transmute these properties into entertaining movies. The real evidence for this, however, is thin.
The latest Marks project focuses around DC’s villain team The Suicide Squad. The film will be based on the Dirty Dozen-ish idea that a bunch of bad guys could band together and tackle missions as redemption for past actions. Given that Marks has already tackled the Supermax idea, which puts Green Arrow in a prison with loads of bad dudes this assignment isn’t much of a surprise.
But when Warner Brothers and DC are having trouble getting a franchise universe off the ground, shouldn’t they really focus on the core ideas rather than making this? It is still traditional to establish the bedrock stories before making spin-offs, yes?