Hope was renewed for Eric Powell’s much loved The Goon when it hit Kickstarter back in 2012, but unfortunately, all the work has been behind the scenes, leading many to think the project was either dead or put on the shelf.
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The good news is that Director Tim Miller’s vision for Deadpool raked in a great deal of money for the studio, and has put Miller on the most wanted list, reigniting interest in the project. Miller and Jeff Fowler are directing the animated project, with David Fincher on as producer. Miller spoke to Collider about the renewed interest his hit flick has brought to the property.
“If Deadpool shined any light in the direction of the studio, we wanna use some of that light to shine it on Goon. So we’ve been doing a lot of work lately, we did some voiceover last week.”
“I do think that there is a corollary. Deadpool proves it, in a big way, that there is a market for this stuff out there… Goon is very much an action—it’s got a lot of heart, it’s got a lot of comedy, it’s got a lot of similarities to what I think was successful in Deadpool, and so I think it’s not a stretch to compare those two things and say the world is a little more ready than they used to be for this kind of material. In the past, there’s reasons why The Goon wasn’t made, it’s because people were afraid of edgy animation. Now I think that Deadpool has proved that that audience is out there in a bigger way than some people thought.”
The Kickstarter money was used to produce an 85-minute animatic so they could show studios the entire film in their pitch. Now that interest has picked back up, they aren’t wasting any of the opportunities.
“Before we did our Kickstarter, we did a whole round with the studios, so we went down, Jeff and me, sometimes Fincher, sometimes Josh Donnen, and we went to all the studios and did our pitch for The Goon. We had a really beautiful pitch, we had a test piece, we had our book, we had all this stuff and at that time it was a $50 million project and we couldn’t get anybody to bite. Everybody loved it, but nobody would do it. So we went back and reworked the price a little bit and decided we were gonna take it out again, and right before we did that this demand to do a Kickstarter came up and then we said, ‘Okay fuck it, we’ll wait, we’ll do the Kickstarter, and then we can literally show executives the whole film. Here’s the film, you don’t have to listen to me tell you what it’s going to be, you can see what it’s going to be.’ And that’s what we did.”
“We haven’t taken it back out yet, but I can honestly say, without saying who, there has been a number of calls now—for years it didn’t happen—saying, ‘Hey we hear you have this Goon project. When can we see it? What can we see?’ Jeff and I re-recorded some V.O. for the animatic last week, we’re doing some more week after next with a very prominent movie star. We know we’ve got a really good shot here and we wanna put our best foot forward.”
If the patience means the property gets done right, I’m all for it. Deadpool has opened a lot of eyes, and even though The Goon isn’t going for the same R-rated fare, it’s still going to be edgy in its own right. Hopefully, the film finally goes into production soon.
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