the-goon

Back in 2012 the director of ‘Deadpool, Tim Miller, wanted to bring another R-Rated comic book film to the big screen in ‘The Goon’. While a successful Kickstarter was able to bring in $441,900, a film never materialized as Miller and co-director Jeff Fowler were unable to sell their pitch to a studio. The movie was to be based off of Eric Powell’s cult classic comic by the same name and even had David Fincher involved at one point. While at the time it didn’t go anywhere, Miller’s success with The Merc With The Mouth may have bought him enough chips to cash in to have the film made after all!

In the comic, we follow The Goon and his friend Franky who go up against the main villain known as The Priest as well as his minions and other minor enemies throughout the series. You’ll see them battle zombies, hobos, a giant squid, and so much more. Not only that but you’ll both cringe and laugh while everything goes down!

‘The Goon’ was a 50 issue run by Powell which kicked off in 1999. A perfect mixture of fantasy, horror, and comedy it completely fits in the style of film Miller has just given us. In fact you would be hard pressed to not see fans of ‘Deadpool’ and ‘The Goon’ not see similarities of style here. It initially was released through Avatar before Dark Horse Comics picked it up in 2003.

So what did happen to the Kickstarter project? A few years back Miller said that:

“I know it annoys the Kickstarter fans so much and I’m sorry because everybody gives us their hard-earned money and they’re so generous about it and they go, ‘What the fuck is going on? Why is nothing happening?’ We took that Kickstarter money and spent it all on a full 85-minute animatic of the film. We showed it to [David] Fincher, we’ve been working on it diligently, we got a bunch of notes, and we’ve been working on the notes. It’s just it took all of the Kickstarter money to do the 85-minutes of that and fulfill all the other stuff, so we go back to this additional work, [which] goes into the cracks between actual paying projects.”

While many fans are still angry about this it looks like their hard earned donations might finally be getting the film somewhere, even if it is quite a few years later.

How are things different now? Obviously his most recent hit shows that there is a market as:

“I do think that there is a corollary. Deadpool proves it, in a big way, that there is a market for this stuff out there… Goon is very much an action—it’s got a lot of heart, it’s got a lot of comedy, it’s got a lot of similarities to what I think was successful in Deadpool, and so I think it’s not a stretch to compare those two things and say the world is a little more ready than they used to be for this kind of material. In the past, there’s reasons why The Goon wasn’t made, it’s because people were afraid of edgy animation. Now I think that Deadpool has proved that audience is out there in a bigger way than some people thought.”

While ‘Deadpool 2‘ and potentially ‘X-Force‘ will be keeping Miller quite busy in the years to come, he did already have a story boarded script ready to go. This is a project that needs voice work, animators, and some fine tuning but the guts are there so if studio interest is as well we could see it happening sooner than later.

Would you be looking forward to seeing ‘The Goon’? Do you think that Miller’s work on ‘Deadpool’ proves that he can bring this comic character to life as well? Share your thoughts below!

Source: Screen Rant

Stuart Conover is an author, blogger, and all around geek. When not busy being a father and husband he tries to spend as much time as possible immersed in comic books, science fiction, and horror! Would you like to know more? Follow him on Twitter!