According to Vulture, Disney is planning a reboot remake† of The Rocketeer, their 1991 film directed by Captain America‘s Joe Johnston in his second feature. I was sitting here trying to come up with something, anything interesting about The Rocketeer, and the best I could come up with was that Jennifer Connelly played the love interest in it, which means that she’s been hot for 20-plus years. Impressive.
Now that Disney’s troubled movie studio is under new management, our spies tells us that, curiously, one of the first properties to be developed for a feature film is a reboot of 1991’s thirties-set adventure film, The Rocketeer.
In it, a racing pilot named Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) discovers a rocket-pack prototype in his stunt plane, hidden there by the gangsters who stole it from Howard Hughes.
The Rocketeer was first published in 1982 by tiny (and now, sadly, defunct) Pacific Comics, and was conceived by artist Dave Stevens as an homage to the serial action heroes of the thirties. By the time Disney released The Rocketeer in 1991, Pacific had already been liquidated for half a decade. Stevens lost a battle with leukemia in March 2008
We’re told the studio will soon be meeting with various writers to come up with a take. But its reappearance at Disney now, of course, begs the question: Why? [Vulture]
Why? Because it’s quasi-superhero-esque, duh. The Avengers made a billion dollars, and The Dark Knight Rises will surely get there, so if you have something in your back catalog that looks kind of like Iron Man, what do you think you’re going to do? I’m sure it will be a bland Disney film, but the original did involve jetpacks and Nazi Zeppelins, so who knows? More importantly, all of this led me to this gif:
Boy howdy.
†Everyone else called it a “reboot,” and the next thing I knew, I too had typed reboot without even thinking about it. You see what reading trade news every day does to a person? But The Rocketeer doesn’t have sequels, so what would make it a reboot? It’s a remake. “Reboot” is a stupid word. Let’s not use it unless we have to.