Having leapt from relative obscurity to being the director of one of the year’s biggest superhero hits, pretty much overnight, Deadpool director Tim Miller is looking to use his recently acquired clout to get another comic book adaptation off the ground. Miller’s been attached to co-direct a CGI adaptation of Eric Powell’s Dark Horse comic The Goon for years now, and, according to an interview he recently did with Collider, might finally be in a position to bring the once-crowdfunded project to life.
“There have been a number of calls now—for years it didn’t happen—saying, ‘Hey we hear you have this Goon project,” Miller told the interviewer. “When can we see it? What can we see?” The project—which is also backed by producer David Fincher—ran a successful Kickstarter campaign four years ago, which raised $440,000 that went toward an 85-minute animatic that was shopped around unsuccessfully to studios last year. But then, last year Miller hadn’t helped Ryan Reynolds explosively smash the fourth wall, allowing nearly a billion bucks to come tumbling in for 20th Century Fox.
Miller (and his co-director, Jeff Fowler) also discussed the way Deadpool’s success opened studios up to the idea of PG-13-rated animation: “In the past, there’s reasons why The Goon wasn’t made, it’s because people were afraid of edgy animation. Now I think that Deadpool has proved that that audience is out there in a bigger way than some people thought.” Obviously, Deadpool wasn’t animated, but it’s possible that Miller is referring to the movie’s occasionally Looney Tunes-esque sensibilities, which could translate pretty well into Powell’s Prohibition-esque story about a hulking, zombie-fighting crime boss, and his fast-talking, gun-toting sidekick.