For those of us who only cared about Ant Man as far as Edgar Wright was involved, the most important question in the wake of Wright’s departure wasn’t what’s going to happen to the movie about the ant superhero, but rather what Edgar Wright is going to work on now instead. While Wright recently tweeted and deleted a picture of Buster Keaton holding a Coronetto, which many interpreted as a reference to Buster Keaton’s famous pronouncement that working with a studio ruined his career, it sounds like things between Wright and Disney (which owns Marvel) can’t be that bad. According to Deadline, Wright is working with the Mouse Haus on an adaptation of the TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Though it’s a little unclear how speculative this is at this point.
I am excited about the prospect of him stepping right into the Disney remake of the great TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Wright has been developing this for Johnny Depp to play the tabloid news reporter, played by Darren McGavin in the original 70s movie and series. If you don’t recall it, Kolchak covered crime for a tabloid and his cases always led to supernatural perpetrators that included zombies, vampires, werewolves and aliens. Of course, neither his editor nor anyone else would believe him or allow him to run what seemed like outrageous stories, but he always got close enough to the truth that he was stalked by these great villains and found a way to dispatch them.
Ah, yes, I remember the Night Stalker. He was the one who broke into all of the homes in LA and raped and murdered people and drew pentagrams with their blood, right? Sounds like a perfect part for Johnny Depp. …Wait, what’s that? Okay, I’m being told that they’re different Night Stalkers. Bummer. I was really curious how Edgar Wright would handle all the Satanic rapes. They probably would’ve been all subdued and British.
In any case, I’m not so hot on remakes of old TV shows, but I’m interested if it’s Edgar Wright’s next project. He could film Johnny Depp making shadow puppets with his collection of bauble-encrusted neckerchiefs for two hours and it’d still be better than Dark Shadows.