As the story has long been told, Quentin Tarantino once toyed with making a Luke Cage movie. After “Reservoir Dogs,” the writer/director spoke with producer Ed Pressman about the possibility, and he wanted Laurence Fishburne to play the Marvel character, but Tarantino made “Pulp Fiction” instead, and the rest is history. However, the filmmaker has said Luke Cage was his favorite comic book character, so if anyone is going to have an opinion about how the hero is portrayed, it’s Tarantino. And for him, he would’ve preferred a series not set in the present day.
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“…frankly, to tell you the truth, I might be one of the pains in their asses because I love the way the character was presented so much in the ’70s,” Tarantino told Yahoo. “I’m not really that open to a rethinking on who he was. I just think that first issue, that origin issue … was so good, and it was really Marvel’s attempt to try to do a blacksploitation movie vibe as one of their superhero comics. And I thought they nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. So, just take that Issue 1 and put it in script form and do that. The Luke Cage: Hero for Hire era…that’s the era.”
Bear in mind, these comments were made during last year’s press rounds for “The Hateful Eight,” so who knows, maybe Tarantino has seen the show as it is, and digs it. But more crucially, it explains why someone like Tarantino would never step into the current Marvel-verse: he’d want to do his own thing, instead of adhering to a current storyline or the templates of how these movies are made.
To get an idea of what Tarantino liked about the Hero For Hire era of Luke Cage, check out issue number 13 below.