For years now, rumors have floated in and out that DC was looking to bring Booster Gold back into live action. There have been movie rumors, team-up movie rumors, and even a TV show that got as far as having a pilot script rejected at Syfy. That rejected pilot briefly convinced a number of Krypton fans that Adam Strange might be Booster Gold in disguise — something that turned out not to be true, obviously. But while Booster’s son, Rip Hunter, made his way to the Waverider for the first couple of seasons of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Booster himself hasn’t been in live action since Smallville‘s final season.
There are three different major takes on Booster Gold’s personality, and it’s possible that navigating which one is the definitive take is part of the issue in terms of setting a direction for TV and film. But that’s what we’re here for!
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So, the three major takes on Booster Gold:
The original: Booster Gold, who traveled back in time from the 25th Century, is a corporate pitchman and a secretive superhero, whose origin wasn’t even known to the audience until well into his 2-year-long series in the ’80s. His supporting cast is largely made up of people who work for him in Booster Gold International, the company he owns. His supervillain foes were largely original characters with low profiles, backed by The 1000 (an updated version of The 100 with higher tech).
Justice League International: Booster Gold, a time-traveling superhero who doesn’t really do anything with time travel, is best pals with Blue Beetle, and the pair of them are members of the Justice League, the world’s greatest superhero team but also fairly dysfunctional in their dynamic.Beetle and Booster area comic duo, cracking wise and hatching schemes, but their hearts are in the right place.
Post-52: As Time Masters, Booster and Rip Hunter work together to stop temporal anomalies from taking root in the timeline, and travel through time to make sure villains can’t break time. His villains are largely mysterious, time-traveling figures with convoluted ties to Booster himself, or to DC Universe history.
So…which one would be the one to go with?
Some movies have been rumored as team-up movies or buddy comedies with one or both versions of Blue Beetle (Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes). Those have, as far as we can tell, only ever got to the rumor stage, with no scripts actually going forward.
The “classic” Booster is the one that is easiest to pitch, in that he basically feels like Greg Kinnear’s Captain Amazing from Mystery Men — except that he actually does care about helping people. He just likes making money doing it. This version has never been a frontrunner, although since it’s the core take, obviously elements of it will make their way into more or less any version. A blend of this version and the Justice League International take has informed Booster’s animated appearances in the last few years.
The time-traveling post-52 version is likely the best thing to base a modern-day movie around, although the difficulty becomes having the Zack Snyder/Marvel movie issue where there’s basically no supporting cast to speak of and every moment becomes about superheroing. That can distance people from the soul of the characters.
So — what might a Booster movie look like? It feels likely that it would be a time-traveling buddy comedy, with roots in the “corporate sellout” image, whether it’s played straight (as in the ’80s) or played as his cover for the Time Master gig, avoiding being attacked by time-traveling supervillains.
Which version would you most like to see from a potential adaptation of Booster Gold? Sound off in the comments.
