Sony has acquired the film rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, apparently with an eye toward making yet another live-action adaptation of the famed literary character.
It’s been six years since the last time Hollywood made a Tarzan movie—2016 Alexander Skarsgård vehicle The Legend Of Tarzan—so fuck knows we were due. Burroughs’ jungle-raised Brit-by-birth is, after all, one of the most adapted fictional characters of all time; more than 20 different actors have portrayed him in live action over the last century, with Johnny Weissmüller, who played the character from 1932’s Tarzan The Ape Man through 1948’s Tarzan And The Mermaids, the most prolific. (Other notable Tarzans include Christopher Lambert, who played the title character of 1984’s more highbrow Greystoke, and future Vikings star Travis Fimmel, who starred in the 2003 WB series Tarzan, the show that dared to ask: What if Jane was a police detective and Tarzan helped her solve crimes in modern-day New York?)
But we digress! (Did you know Supernatural creator Eric Kripke co-developed that Tarzan show? He later called it “a piece of crap’ and “a hell ride in every way.” So that’s fun! But we digress.) The film rights to Tarzan—who Burroughs originally created in 1912—have bounced all over the place over the years; Disney, obviously, had their own animated version in the 1990s, while Village Roadshow made the last couple of live-action movies (including Legend) with an assist from Warner Bros. Now Sony’s got them, presumably in the hopes of achieving the perversely difficult task of getting movie-going audiences to give a shit about a character who pretty much everybody in the English-speaking world knows by name. (Disney’s Tarzan did perfectly well for itself back in 1999—thanks, Phil Collins—but the Skarsgård movie fell fairly far short of its blockbuster ambitions.)
Sony’s intent is apparently to do a “total reinvention” of the character, which, given how many very old, very outdated storytelling tropes this particular white savior-type is rooted in, is a pretty understandable starting point for any kind of new version.
[via THR]
