Chris Columbus names cinema’s only “perfect” superhero movie
Chris Columbus is having a bit of a rough time of late.
Sure, he’s got plenty of credit in the bank, what with being a hugely successful movie director with films like Mrs Doubtfire, Home Alone and Gremlins under his belt, but he’s still under the cosh after expressing a little element of jealousy over the new Harry Potter TV series.
Because Nick Frost’s ‘Hagrid’ basically looks the same as he did in the original movie franchise, which Columbus was heavily involved with, he has said that he doesn’t really see the point in the reboot, which will hit screens sometime in 2027. He recently told a movie podcast: “I thought everything was going to be different, but it’s more of the same. It’s all going to be the same.”
But things aren’t really all that bad in the Columbus household, what with his directing the new Thursday Murder Club movie on Netflix, which is getting rave reviews, despite reading the books being the equivalent of asking a seven-year-old what they did over the summer holidays and asking them to add in a death somewhere.
The inexplicable popularity of the novels was enough to attract not just Columbus to the project but Steven Spielberg too, and the movie features a cast of ageing greats including Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley.
So while Columbus is more than happy doing septuagenarian mysteries set in care homes, and has dabbled in the world of big screen magic thanks to his directing two of the Harry Potter films, he revealed this week that a superhero adaptation is definitely not on the list, thanks to his fingers being burned previously. Not literally, though.
Back in 2005 when the very first Fantastic Four movie (that nobody asked for) came around, Columbus was listed as an executive producer, but the truth is that he didn’t really have any involvement on it after being fired early on. He explained: “I had a script, I was producing it. I met with the director and had some ideas. I basically said, ‘Some of this conceptual art should feel more like Jack Kirby, the creator of the Fantastic Four, and should feel more like the Silver Age of Marvel.’ I left that meeting and on the way back from my house I got a call from the head of 20th Century Fox saying I was fired and had too much of an opinion.”
Despite that altercation, he also somehow got an executive producer credit on the 2007 sequel (that nobody asked for) too, but also wasn’t involved in the movie. Aside from that, Columbus wrote a script for Marvel’s Daredevil with Ben Affleck in 2003 that didn’t get used, leading to his cooling on the genre to say the least.
He told Variety: “Over the years people have done it (superhero movies) so well that I personally lost interest in making a superhero movie. It started a little bit with Spider-Man 2. When I saw what Sam Raimi did with that I thought it was a perfect superhero movie”.
“Certainly Matt Reeves’ The Batman with Robert Pattinson was a brilliant film, too,” he added. “I realized I don’t have a desire to make those movies anymore because people are doing them better than I ever could at this point in my career.”
Spider-Man 2 dropped in 2004, with Tobey Maguire back in the suit, Kirsten Dunst doing her thing, and Alfred Molina causing chaos as Doc Ock. It cleaned up at the box office – nearly $800m made off a budget that was peanuts by comparison. Critics were all over it, too. Roger Ebert went as far as calling it the best superhero film since Superman first kicked the door in back in ’78.
