Mel Stewart To Pen 'Phantom' Menace
Crusader Entertainment and Hyde Park have commissioned screenwriter Mel Stewart to write a project based on The Phantom comics. Apparently the embarrassing box office returns of the 1996 film weren't sufficiently humiliating enough to discourage a remake.
Crusader Entertainment and Hyde Park have commissioned screenwriter Mel Stewart to write a project based on The Phantom comics. Apparently the 1996 feature film directed by Simon Wincer and starring Billy Zane, Kristy Swanson, Treat Williams and a then-unknown Catherine Zeta-Jones is not enough. The film grossed a paltry $17 million at the box office. Apparently the embarrassing box office weren't sufficiently humiliating enough to discourage a remake.
The superhero, clad in a purple suit, has no supernatural powers but appears immortal and fights evil in Africa. It is understood that the updated version will be modernized.
"While I like the comic book franchises of the 1990s, I always wanted to be able to identify with my hero more," Stewart said. "Take all of the technology of 2004, where science fiction is no longer that -- it's science fact. If you had all that technology at your fingerprints, you would be a superhero."
Yeah, whatever. The truth is that the marketplace has now reached critical mass with an oversaturation of sub-level, B-list comic book projects. Crusader Entertainment is really dredging the bottom of the barrel to do a remake of a film that wasn't a particularly big hit to begin with. Some comics simply work better as, believe it or not, comic books, and not as major motion pictures. But hey, I guess if the studios have money to burn, who am I to object?