You could make a case that Stephen Norrington’s “Blade” was ground zero for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s unprecedented blockbuster run. Though it hit theaters in 1998, 11 years before the release of “Iron Man,” if you grew up reading comic books, you could sense a kindred charge from your fellow moviegoers the second Snipes got on with his vampire-killing business. This wasn’t Tim Burton’s “Batman,” which used Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” as window dressing; Norrington’s “Blade” possessed the swagger and lethality of the character created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan.
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Norrington immediately became a fan-favorite filmmaker (his reputation bolstered by “Blade” becoming one of the first must-own DVDs as the medium caught fire), which led a significant contingent of geeks to lobby for him to direct everything from “X-Men” to “Spider-Man.” When he finally alit on “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” an adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s loopy comic book mash-up that brought together such genre characters as Allan Quatermain, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mina Harker, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, I thought his gift for world building might take this burgeoning big-screen genre in an unexpected direction.
Norrington certainly did the unexpected with “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” The “Blade” director ended two careers on this movie. It also grossed a distressingly light $179 million against a $78 million budget. But yesterday’s disasters are sometimes ripe for rediscovery decades later. Is this one of those cases? Tubi subscribers are inexplicably keen to find out!
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An extraordinary failure in a league of its own
When 20th Century Fox released “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” the studio was probably hoping to draw an opening weekend split with Disney’s based-on-an-amusement-park-ride dice-throw “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” The latter was initially treated as an industry joke due to its choice of source material, but once the studio began screening the movie for critics, it was clear Gore Verbinski had delivered a crowd-pleasing romp.
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Fox, unfortunately, had a stinker on its hands. Norrington and credited screenwriter James Dale Robinson used many of the same characters that Moore and O’Neill employed in their extravagant adventure, but they whiffed on the tone. It wasn’t clever, it wasn’t fun, and it looked like star Sean Connery wanted to run screaming from the set in every scene. Factor in loads of unfinished visual f/x, and the film was one big middle finger to moviegoers.
Even though the film holds a 17% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, according to FlixPatrol, Tubi viewers have made “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” the second most popular movie on the streaming platform. Maybe it plays better as distracted viewing, but that’s hardly a recommendation. All that matters is that the film drove Connery into retirement and caused Norrington to claim he’d never direct another movie. The latter was attached to a remake of “The Crow” for a while in the late 2000s, but this never came to fruition. But don’t let that stop you from giving “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” a whirl on Tubi!
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