Since the one phrase Hollywood executives like more than “remake” is “public domain property,” there’s been a glut of film projects recently that all traffic in the sweet, sweet realm of intellectual property you don’t have to pay anyone to use. And since the other thing Hollywood executives love is not having to do the hard work of finding those ideas on their own, they just do whatever everyone else is doing, the better to insulate themselves against being blamed when it all goes horribly awry. That’s how we end up with situations like this: Deadline reports that Warner Bros. just put a new Robin Hood film into development, meaning there are now four fucking Robin Hood movies you’re going to have to skim by on cable several years from now.
This latest iteration of the man who robs from the moviegoers and gives to the studios comes from Gangster Squad and Aquaman screenwriter Will Beall. The details of the story are being kept a secret for now, much like the explanation for why in God’s name Warner Bros. would think vomiting yet another Robin Hood movie into production was a good idea. Perhaps Warner Bros. hopes that all the advertising generated by the competing projects will confuse the public into seeing them all thinking they’re part of the same Avengers-style universe, much like Sony is trying to do with its own Robin Hood film. It’s a trick in Los Angeles known as the “Deep ImpArmaggedon” effect.
So, to recap: We’ve got Sony’s “dark and gritty” (obviously) Robin Hood film in the vein of Mission: Impossible films, called Hood. There’s Disney’s live-action version of Brandon Barker’s Nottingham & Hood script, also imaginatively titled Hood. Lionsgate has its equally “dark and gritty” take on the icon from King Arthur scribe Joby Harold, called Robin Hood: Origins (because that worked out so well for Wolverine). And now this. With a little luck, a few more studios will announce their competing Robin Hood films as well, and the combined weight of all these assembled projects will collapse into a singularity, slowly pulling us all into a world where we never need see another Robin Hood movie again.