Nobody knows better than Disney that comic book adaptations are all the rage, and so are remakes. When you have a property like The Rocketeer with its rights gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, and a film that many said was ahead of its time, it seems like a no-brainer to dust off those rights and make a new sequel/reboot.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, that is just what Disney is going to do. But to all you Rocketeer fans out there, don’t get giddy just yet, because there will be some changes.
Here is the plot description from the article:
The new take keeps the story in a period setting and offers a fresh view on the characters. Set six years after the original Rocketeer and after Secord has vanished while fighting the Nazis, an unlikely new hero emerges: a young African–American female pilot, who takes up the mantle of Rocketeer in an attempt to stop an ambitious and corrupt rocket scientist from stealing jet-pack technology in what could prove to be a turning point in the Cold War.
There are about five things in that write up that will cause fan outrage, and only a couple would make the complainer look like a racist of sexist.
My take? I think the path of an African-American female pilot in the time period is an interesting one, being that at the time they had to run up against the double-edge sword of racism and sexism. But I doubt the film would have room for even a perfunctory examination of that, especially if it follows the “High Adventure Serial” style of the original. On a more superficial note, Indiana Jones didn’t fare all that well when he moved from fighting Nazis to fighting Commies.
The film will be written by Max Winkler and Matt Spicer. The Jungle Book producer Brigham Taylor will be co-producing the film with Mortal Media, a new venture created by Blake Griffin of the L.A. Clippers and Ryan Kalil of the Carolina Panthers.
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