Plenty of movies have spent years if not decades in development hell, only to finally emerge into the light when it was thought all hope was lost.
Sometimes, you eventually end up with finished products like Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, which the actor spent a dozen years trying to get made, or you get a colossal flop like Ang Lee and Will Smith’s Gemini Man, which hit the big screen with a dull thud and bombed at the box office 22 years after the project was initially pitched.
The Goon falls somewhere in the middle, with the CG-animated comic book adaptation first announced in June 2008. Veteran character actor Clancy Brown was set to voice the title role, with Paul Giamatti lending support, and David Fincher was on board as one of the producers.
It even got a trailer in 2010, but it doesn’t seem to have moved much further along than that. Speaking to Collider in a recent interview, Brown offered the best status update that he could, given the thick fog of uncertainty that still surrounds The Goon.
“I haven’t. There was some noise, I think it was after Guardians of the Galaxy did so well, or maybe it was after Deadpool did so well, that maybe that would … I think it was Deadpool. And so maybe that would shake it loose for The Goon, but I haven’t heard anything. And to me, it smells like there’s legal rights being wrangled. Because I don’t know why you wouldn’t let Paul Giamatti and me and [David] Fincher and the rest of the guys loose on this thing. It just seems like a fun thing. And it’s zombies. Zombies, for crying out loud. And it would be a blast. I’d love to do it. It would be a lot of fun. We just need somebody to pay for it, I think.”
A Kickstarter campaign in 2012 raised $441,000, it was announced to be in development again at 20th Century Fox in the summer of 2019, before it wound up being dropped altogether in the wake of the Disney takeover. Suffice to say, things are not looking good for The Goon fourteen years down the line.
