It’s been over a year since audiences got their first peek at footage from an animated film adaptation of Eric Powell’s The Goon which is to be directed by David Fincher, the auteur behind Se7en, Fight Club and The Social Network whose newest film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, opens in theaters this week. But that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten it.”Eric rewrote his script,” the director told MTV News. “He got away from the genesis story, and I feel like we need to go back to a little bit of what he had before.”That’s Eric Powell, of course, as the creator behind the comic book was also tapped to adapt his story into film. It was a big vote of confidence in a hot, young writer and not one that Fincher seems to regret, even though the project hasn’t progressed as quickly as some fans might have hoped. “”I don’t think you can tailor what Powell does to what Hollywood does. I think you have to allow for the disparity,” Fincher is quoted by MTV’s Splash Page as saying.The filmmaker referred to The Goon as “still in development,” according to the Splash Page story, but in Hollywood that’s a very general term that could mean anything. A quick search of the Internet Movie Database and a couple of other likely sites finds no indication that the film has found a studio to underwrite or distribute the film yet, so even if the wheels are still in motion that seems to suggest that little has been done since mid-2010 to move the project toward production.Before he can get to it, though, there are a number of other projects waiting in the wings, each of which seems more likely to be profitable than adapting a cult-favorite Dark Horse comic (Just don’t tell that to the studios who are still busy counting their Hellboy money). In addition to possibly working on the remaining films of the “Millennium Trilogy,” Fincher is locked down to work on the upcoming 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea reboot for Disney as well as the pilot for House of Cards, an original TV series being developed by Netflix.
