Don’t tell Alan Moore, but Hulu is making another League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation
It's time to take another wild swing at what should be a pretty easy adaptation
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one of those great comic book concepts that should make perfect sense for an adaptation. The original story was all about mashing up Victorian-era pop culture characters in the public domain and uniting them on what was essentially a superhero team, telling meta-textual stories about stories through the lens of iconic heroes and villains. Plus, it’s baked into the premise that you can expand it to other eras, Allan Quatermain showing up in one time period and James Bond (or at least a British spy with the serial numbers filed off) in another.
And yet, the 2003 adaptation from director Stephen Norrington cheesed everything up by a few notches and threw in Tom Sawyer as a token American character (as if American audiences aren’t dying to see Alan Quatermain, an iconic hero they’ve never heard of), with the movie becoming one of those weird flops that a ton of people saw but nobody will admit to actually enjoying.
Well, thanks to buying up 20th Century Fox, Disney now owns the rights to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and if Disney knows anything these days it’s milking comic book properties. So, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it and Twentieth Century Studios have decided to give The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen another go with a straight-to-Hulu feature film. Red Sparrow’s Justin Haythe is writing it and THR says he’s “returning to the core comic books” for inspiration, but that’s all we know.
Actually, we also know that Moore (and probably O’Neill as well) will not be involved in any way, with him having sworn off any attempts to make adaptations of his work for reasons that are wholly justified (even if the chip on his shoulder that he has maintained for 30 years regarding some of the ways he’s been screwed over can be pretty tiring).
But hey, we’re giving League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen another go. Cross your fingers that this one catches up to the storyline where the ultimate villain is the Antichrist, a boy who learned how to use magic at a secret wizard school and has a distinctive scar on his forehead. Hmmmmmm….