The new Red Sonja movie — which will bring back to screens a character not seen since the not-well-liked 1985 film version — has been through a lot in the last year, from losing one director (Bryan Singer) to gaining another (Transparent honcho Jill Soloway). But when it finally arrives, whenever that is, its tone will be somewhere between Deadpool and The Dark Knight, according to its maker.
Soloway was speaking about her various projects at the Television Critics Association, as per Deadline, and while she spoke about Transparent’s musical finale and Jeffrey Tambor’s departure, she also (as caught by Entertainment Weekly) opened up a touch about the big budget swords-and-sorcery blockbuster on her docket.
“I can really have so much fun with Red Sonja. I see her a little bit more like the first kind of bad girl superhero,” Soloway said. “Sort of like the Batman of The Dark Knight or Deadpool, you know?”
To be honest, this is slightly confusing. The Dark Knight may be perhaps the most critically lauded superhero movie in the genre’s history, but it’s not exactly fun. It’s intense, brainy, heartbreaking, exciting, entertaining, though not exactly a laugh riot. Deadpool, meanwhile, is a meta deconstruction, mocking the genre’s tropes while still delivering the goods.
Still, Soloway’s words give us some general idea of what to expect — a deconstruction that will be intense but also probably have lots of jokes. Whatever she’s planning, the results will almost certainly be better than the ’85 version, which even one of its stars, one Arnold Schwarzenegger, said was so bad he used to use it as punishment when his kids misbehaved.