Paramount Is Already Rebooting 'The Green Hornet' to Make It More 'Badass'

Gavin O'Connor, the same dude who directed Ben Affleck in this year's 'The Accountant,' is directing the new 'Green Hornet.'

Seth Rogen in 'Green Hornet'
Image via Columbia
Seth Rogen in 'Green Hornet'

Michel Gondry's 2011 take on The Green Hornet understandably gets a bad rap. The film, starring Seth Rogen and Jay Chou, is very far from perfect and arguably contains more than a few downright awful scenes. But the film had its moments, even if very few of those moments ever really reached the level of surreal awesomeness one might expect from a Gondry production. In a surprise move, Paramount Pictures and Chernin Entertainment have snatched up the Green Hornet rights and are now moving forward with a (presumably Seth Rogen-less) reboot.

Paramount already has a director, The Accountant's Gavin O'Connor, lined up to take the lead from a script by Sean O'Keefe. "I've been wanting to make this movie—and create this franchise—since I've wanted to make movies," O'Connor, who has also directed Warrior and the pilot for The Americans, toldDeadline Tuesday. "As a kid, when most of my friends were into Superman and Batman, there was only one superhero who held my interest—The Green Hornet. I always thought he was the baddest badass because he had no superpowers. The Green Hornet was a human superhero. And he didn't wear a clown costume. And he was a criminal—in the eyes of the law—and in the eyes of the criminal world."

O'Connor, who believes the Green Hornet story is ultimately one of "self-discovery," is hoping to reinvent the franchise by placing it in a contemporary context. "The comic book movie is the genre of our time," O'Connor said. "How do we look at it differently? How do we create a distinctive film experience that tells itself differently than other comic book movies? How do we land comfortably at the divide between art and industry?"

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In the years since the release of Gondry's Green Hornet, even the film's stars have admitted disappointment with the final product. Speaking with noted What the Fucker Marc Maron back in 2013, Rogen said he and Evan Goldberg entered the project while still completely naive about the industry. "We can't make a really edgy fun movie for our types of people for that amount of money," Rogen explained. "There's just too much skepticism that it draws. Mo money, mo problems. You can't take risks. [The studio] wouldn't let us take risks anyway. And that makes it very hard to make a movie that's exciting."

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