I’m surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. An old Joss Whedon script – like really old, like old enough to drink in bars old – has been dusted off and will soon go into production with Liam Neeson in the lead role.
Or that’s how Neeson makes it sound anyway. He’s been speaking to Empire, saying that he’s agreed to star in a film called Suspension about a man hanging from New York’s George Washington Bridge. As the publication notes, that’s the title and premise of spec script that Whedon sold in 1993.
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Unsurprisingly, because this is late-career, post-Taken Neeson, the lead character is a troubled cop-killer who gets involved in a Die Hard-style stand-off with terrorists that have put the bridge in danger. He shimmies up and down and around and scoots abut and takes control of the bridge and saves the day.
There’s no word, yet, on who else will be in the film, who will be directing – though it would seem to be Jaume Collet-Serra’s job to lose if we’re being honest – and if it really is the Whedon script, though it seems like too much of a coincidence to be anything but.
Incidentally, Whedon sold another spec script around the same time for a film called Afterlife. That never got made but Ariel Vroman’s upcoming Criminal, with no less than Ryan Rodney Reynolds, seems to be based on the same premise: a dead hero gets his personality implanted into the body of a dangerous killer and has to fight against impulses to become a wrong-doer.
Seems like Joss Whedon really has had all of the good ideas already.
