‘Biker Mice from Mars’: the bizarre cartoon Aaron Taylor-Johnson wants to turn into a movie
Aaron Taylor-Johnson might be on to something with his adaptation pitch.
The man may have run into the ‘Brad Pitt problem’ of being an impossibly good-looking actor who seems to always be cast as a leading man, despite being better suited for character parts, and even if he has been considered such an obvious movie star that he’s rumoured to take up the role of James Bond, he’s been able to do much better work when he can simply play oddball roles.
Johnson has admitted to not being a big fan of blockbusters, which isn’t that surprising when considering his track record with them. His first major role in a film was when he was a child star in Shanghai Knights, the anticipated sequel to the western comedy adventure Shanghai Noon, which starred Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. It was a disappointing sequel on every level, and Johnson was saddled with a particularly underwritten character.
The roles didn’t get much better for him when he grew older, and he was cast for the lead role in 2014’s Godzilla, in which he was almost completely anonymous because of the incompetence of director Gareth Edwards at telling a story. While he did deliver a fun performance as Pietro Maximoff in Avengers: Age of Ultron, he was killed off instantly, ensuring that he would not get to continue playing the character within the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It’s in between these parts that Johnson has been able to do more challenging roles that transform his image; he even won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role as a terrifying criminal in the Tom Ford film Nocturnal Animals. Given that his wife, Sam Taylor-Johnson, is a filmmaker who has directed him multiple times, it seems like Johnson might be a good fit for the director’s chair if he ever wanted to step beyond the spotlight.
The issue that any creative person in Hollywood faces is that the industry values established intellectual property more than anything else, and any emerging filmmakers are forced to consider what they might want to adapt, but to Johnson’s credit, he came up with an answer that no one would have ever expected.
“I liked the Ninja Turtles; I used to love watching all that stuff,” he told The Guardian, “There was another one called Biker Mice from Mars that was brilliant. A movie of that could be a cool thing, but you know, I’m trying to find more original material, which is just as hard to come by.”
Biker Mice from Mars was an obscure cartoon from the mid-90s about a group of mice from the planet Mars who are forced to relocate to Earth, where they battle evil aliens known as ‘the Plutarkians’, and despite being a show ostensibly for children that aired on syndication, it featured non-stop action involving monsters, aliens, robots, and lots of laser pistols.
While making a Biker Mice from Mars film might seem laughable on paper, it is easy to forget that sceptics had the same attitude about many adaptations that ended up being massive hits, such as Barbie and A Minecraft Movie, and should Johnson actually be able to acquire the rights to Biker Mice from Mars and put a script together, he might be able to make the rare blockbuster that people could actually get behind.
