IR-Rated 90s Sci-Fi Made to Teach a Hollywood Lesson

By Jonathan Klotz and Joshua Tyler | Published 8 seconds ago

Photo by Tim Burton Batman set the box office on fire in 1989, and began rushing studios to push the next big superhero movie. Unlike the superhero rush of the early 2000s, those former studio executives returned to the pulp heroes of the 1930s.

Dick Tracy, A shadowagain The Phantom theaters, bringing old radio series and comic books to life. Along with production A shadowUniversal Studios also introduced a more direct approach to the problem of trying to repeat the success of Batman by making their own, modern superhero franchise, like Batman.

To do it, they hired a man who had set himself up as an up-and-coming genius in a scary place. Sam Raimi was the right man for the job, but he was ahead of his time. His biggest breakthrough wouldn’t come until 12 years after the release of his Universal film.

Sam Raimi Makes His Own Hero After Being Rejected by Hollywood

Sam Raimi was coming out Evil Dead 2is still considered by many to be his best film, and Hollywood studios are beginning to take notice of the unconventional filmmaker. Sadly, Universal Pictures, the rights holders A shadowhe passed on Raimi leading the Alec Baldwin pulp superhero film.

Disheartened, Raimi instead wrote a screenplay revolving around a character called Darkman, a hero he created in a short story years ago. With that, he caught the attention of Universal.

Played by Liam Neeson, Darkman begins life as Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on artificial skin becomes paralyzed when his lab is robbed by criminals looking for evidence that their boss is committing a crime.

Westlake is left horribly burned, but experimental surgery gives him superhuman powers, which he uses alongside artificial skin that allows him to disguise himself as a human, as long as he stays out of the light, to dismantle a criminal network. On the surface, it’s a typical superhero revenge story, though Sam Raimi focuses on Westlake’s changing emotional state as he embraces life as a beast, turning his back on his girlfriend Julie after she professes her love for him.

He is black equal parts pulp heroic fisticuffs and gothic tragedy, but it proved that Sam Raimi knows what makes a superhero movie work. Unfortunately, it didn’t give Universal what they wanted.

The Darkman sequels were thrown into the Bargain Bin

He is black it’s one of those movies that people like to rebrand as a success because it didn’t lose money. That’s a very low bar. Universal did not He is black making a small profit; they did it to create a franchise that could ride the post-Batman a heroic wave.

For that, it failed completely. True success is getting the follow-up sequences that people see in theaters. He is black dumped in the direct-to-video barrel with a lead for repetition, which is Hollywood code for “we’re shy but we’re not done squeezing IP yet.”

The warning signs were there immediately. yes, He is black opened at number one, but did so with already disappointing numbers in a Tim Burton-remastered market. This was 1990, when studios were hunting the next pop-culture monster, not celebrating “the best.”

He is black it didn’t dominate the summer conversation, it didn’t generate cultural history, and it didn’t turn Liam Neeson into a genre icon. Instead, it quietly came out of theaters in the season Batman knockoffs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ate his lunch.

Why Darkman failed

Part of what makes Darkman such a great movie is what made it such a hard sell to audiences. He is black it’s not weird enough to be a midnight cult, and it’s not clean enough to be a four-quadrant song.

It’s weird, bad, occasionally flashy, and totally unmarketable to kids, who were the real engine of Batman’s money and genre filmmaking in the early ’90s. You can’t build an empire on a hero who melts his face, has a chemical rage, and whose love ends in a parking lot goodbye.

He is black was quickly forgotten by the instream in the early 90s, even overshadowed by low box office failures as A shadowand it’s hardly talked about now outside of Raimi’s die-hard fan circles.

That didn’t happen because it was bad, but because the time it was built for was exceeded. It came early enough to look tempting, and just too late to feel dignified. Universal wanted its own Batman. What they got was a cult favorite, a director calling Sam Raimi, and a franchise that limped off to VHS hell.

Sam Raimi Proves Everyone Wrong With Spider-Man

Sam Raimi, of course, would go on to direct one of the most influential superhero movies of all time, 12 years later, when he made it. Spider Man. Using his experience with He is blackRaimi wanted to approach the story of Peter Parker in a different way, choosing to bring in the Green Goblin as the villain and embrace the father/son dynamic between the two.

Surprisingly, you can get a brief glimpse He is black to Spider-Man during Peter’s dream sequence right after he was bitten.

If you’re looking for the true origins of modern superhero movies, this is where they start. As the brilliant filmmaker was turned down for the job he wanted, he made it his own way, anyway.