By now, the many-hands-in-the-pie, everything-on-the-whiteboard approach to blockbuster filmmaking is a well known part of the process. As ‘Rogue One‘ proved, even for a franchise as huge as “Star Wars,” is not above making changes on the fly, or starting with one idea, only to pivot to something else entirely later on. And it’s a process “Sons Of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter learned first hand when he was tapped to work on what became “Punisher: War Zone.” Hired early on to work on a script for the followup to “The Punisher,” the eventual movie that hit theaters bore little resemblance to what he had envisioned, so much so that he took his name off the movie (for reasons he explained in detail). So what happened?
Chatting with Looper a few months back, Sutter revealed that his take on the character essentially went beyond what Marvel was comfortable with, and perhaps even broke canon.
“So I turn in this draft, and I’m, like, ‘Aw, yeah, I’m shakin’ up Marvel, man!’ And literally there were people—including [producer] Gale Ann Hurd—who were, like, ‘Uh…’ They didn’t know what the f— happened! And it’s not like I didn’t do the things I said I was going to do, but…I also did a lot of other things!” he said. “And I’m a Marvel fan, but I was not a comic book kid. I didn’t really get into that whole world until about 15 years ago, which is when I started getting into graphic novels. And that happened in Paris, because their graphic novel industry is decades beyond ours! But I didn’t realize that you can’t take liberties with some of the characters and some of the traits, because they are what they are. They’re very derivative, they’re stereotyped, but this is the guy that does this, and this is the guy who does this… So they’re two-dimensional for a reason: that’s the purpose they serve. So I was trying to expand the Marvel Universe in a direction it should not have been expanded in [laughs].”
Sutter admits he was “too naïve in the process,” and if you’re thinking his take might’ve been too violent, it sounds like it was maybe too dramatic.
“I think I was trying to write to the emotionality of this dude and motivate the absurd violence with some kind of meaning. I don’t mean that I was, like, f—ing Gandhi [Laughs]. But I was just trying to root it a little bit more in the mental anguish that he went through to justify it, and to take a little bit of that journey… So I think that’s what I was trying to do: humanize him a little bit more,” he explained. “But it’s the kind of thing where there’s only X amount of time [in] the movies, so you have moments of that, but you can’t really have a subplot that explores that kind of thing. Not in a summer blockbuster or Marvel picture.”
But perhaps in a TV series? We’ll see what Marvel decides to go in regard to The Punisher’s motivations in the upcoming Netflix series, and perhaps Sutter’s approach — even if it isn’t his exact work — will see the light of day after all. Until then, you’ll just have to imagine what could’ve been. [via Heroic Hollywood]
