fDavid Fincher, who made the career-defining Fight Club in 1999, once entertained the idea of making Spider-Man that year. Unfortunately, he didn’t care for the source material very much, and that led to an impassable conflict with producers, who sent him packing. The filmmaker, who admits he grew up too early for the “grown-up comics” boom of the 1980s, called the origin story “dumb,” and said that the folks in charge of the movie were very aware that, dumb or not, the origin was important to the fans who would make up the movie’s core audience.
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The movie, of course, ended up being made by Sam Raimi, and landed in theaters in 2002. That same year, Fincher made Panic Room, a thriller starring Jodie Foster and Jared Leto.
Speaking with The Guardian, Fincher said his pitch skipped the origin story and picked up with Peter Parker as an adult, but “they weren’t f—ing interested.”
“And I get it,” Fincher confessed. “They were like: ‘Why would you want to eviscerate the origin story?’ And I was like: ‘[because] it’s dumb?’ That origin story means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I looked at it and I was like: ‘A red and blue spider?’ There’s a lot of things I can do in my life and that’s just not one of them.”
In the time since, Fincher has become one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed filmmakers. His forays into IP-driven filmmaking have been fairly limited, with Alien 3 in 1992 and then The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in 2011. His first-ever comic book adaptation is The Killer, which stars X-Men franchise veteran Michael Fassbender and comes to Netflix on November 10.
The comics it’s based on, Le Tueur, ran from 1998 until 2013, with the most recent hardcover collection arriving in 2017, and centers on the life and work of a killer. At the start of the noir-inspired series, the unnamed assassin had no moral compass, although the original synopsis for the movie suggests that Fincher’s version will pick up at a later point in his story, after he has started to develop a conscience.
According to Netflix, “After a fateful near-miss, an assassin battles his employers and himself on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.” The movie seems like the meat of the film is going to be our antihero (played by Michael Fassbender) in a game of cat-and-mouse with his employer (Tilda Swinton).
The Killer stars Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, leading a cast that includes Kerry O’Malley as Dolores, and Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick) as Hodges, Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket) and Brazilian star (Sophie Charlotte) are also in the film. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mindhunter) is re-teaming with Fincher for the film, while his musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, Mank) will compose the score. Fincher’s Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker is doing the script, which is based on the French graphic novel by Alexis Nolent.
