The last time we saw the Green Hornet, a.k.a Britt Reid, on the big screen it was 2011, and a kind of weird time for superhero movies. Studios hadn’t fully launched their grand interconnected universe visions yet, and there was an awkward middle class of releases like The Green Lantern, The Green Hornet, and R.I.P.D. that failed to resonate with audiences because, well, they weren’t very good. But director Gavin O’Connor, fresh off the success of The Accountant, is ready to revamp his favorite vigilante and repackage him for the current era of superhero-movie domination, and his plans are apparently quite serious. “My intention is to bring a gravitas to The Green Hornet that wipes away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration,” O’Connor told Deadline.
O’Connor further explained that he’s been tracking the rights to the property for nearly two decades, waiting to turn the once-pulpy crime fighter into what sounds like a more Punisher-style antihero by calling him a criminal “in the eyes of the law — and in the eyes of the criminal world,” and making it very clear that his Britt Reid will not be a Seth Rogen–style ne’er-do-well. “He’s a man at war with himself,” O’Connor says of the Hornet. “A secret war of self that’s connected to the absence of his father. It’s the dragon that’s lived with him that he needs to slay. And the journey he goes on to become The Green Hornet is the dramatization of it, and becomes Britt’s true self. I think of this film as Batman upside down meets Bourne inside out by way of Chris Kyle [the hero of American Sniper]. He’s the anti-Bruce Wayne. His struggle: Is he a savior or a destroyer?” Sounds breezy!
