According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is setting his sights on another classic comic-book superhero, teaming with Columbia Pictures to develop a feature film based on Walter B. Gibson’s crime-fighting creation, The Shadow. Raimi and Buckaroo Ent. partner Josh Donen will produce the pic, along with Michael Uslan of Comic Book Movies Llc/Branded Ent., who wrote for Shadow comics in 1970s.
The Shadow was born in the 1930s as a CBS radio show featuring Orson Welles as the voice of Lamont Cranston, a smooth-talking do-gooder with the power to cloud people’s minds. Comic books and live-action serials and television series followed before a 1994 feature film attempted to resurrect the franchise. Despite the perfect casting of Alec Baldwin and the visual flair of director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander), Universal’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation failed to catch on with moviegoers.
Raimi tells the Reporter that he has long dreamed of making a Shadow feature. His own 1990 film, Darkman, in which a burn victim fights baddies in a long coat and hat when he’s not disguising himself with masks, is basically a melding of The Shadow and DC Comics’ The Unknown Soldier, created by Joe Kubert.
Currently finishing Spider-Man 3 for a May, 2007 release, Raimi may be closing the book on his adventures with Peter Parker. Columbia hopes the Shadow deal will have him bringing superhero action to the big screen for years to come, granted this version manages to capture the imagination of its target audience.
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