As the co-creator of pretty much every big-time Marvel superhero, Stan Lee has had a huge impact on the movie industry of today. Now, rather than taking another crack at The Fantastic Four, Twentieth Century Fox has decided to just cut out the middleman and make a movie about Stan Lee himself. Plus, in a goofy twist befitting a man who spent so much of his life writing comic books, this movie won’t be a straight biopic. Instead, it’ll be a quippy action film set in the ‘70s in the vein of Roger Moore’s James Bond or Kingsman: The Secret Service.
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which doesn’t say whether or not Lee himself pitched this to Fox (even though he obviously did), but it does say that Twilight and Power Rangers producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey are on board as producers. No writer or director is attached, but we imagine Lee would probably be fine with taking on one or both of those roles on his own. He’s probably too old to star in the film, but he could easily find an actor who looks just like he did in the ‘70s. Maybe Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio? Actually, give Ryan Gosling a thick mustache and some big sunglasses, and he’d be the spitting image of a 50-year-old Stan Lee.
If this Stan Lee movie takes off, maybe Fox can then make some kind of cinematic universe with similarly fantastical ‘70s action movies about guys like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. Naturally, the Stan Lee character should also be the main protagonist of those movies, but Kirby and Ditko could be acknowledged in some way.