I reviewed 2011’s The Green Hornet and while I thought it wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t faithful enough to the television series it was based on (which ran from 1966-1967 and was a spinoff of Batman, which was cancelled a year later).

The problem by my reckoning was more due to the writing by Seth Rogen and Ethan Goldberg, who worked really hard to turn it into a buddy comedy.

I happened to the listening to The Weekly Planet podcast recently on Youtube, where it was mentioned that a new version was being created, and that Leigh Whannell was in negotiations to direct.

And while I didn’t mind his remake of The Invisible Man I also didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as a lot of people seemed to.

Whannell’s take on the material is likely to be more serious than Rogen and Goldberg interpretation, if only because based upon the movies that I’m aware he’s directed thus far (Upgrade and The Invisible Man. He also directed Insidious: Chapter 3 though I find the Insidious movies a bit hard to judge because I’m also not a fan of most of the movies directed by James Wan, the director of Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2, among many others) have been more serious.

So it’s a bit of a double-edged sword: I definitely want to see more of the character but at the same time I understand if directors continue to interpret the character inaccurately, they’re only increasing the odds that he’ll be put on the shelf again.

After all, if Universal weren’t so high on David Koepp‘s script we might not even be seeing this upcoming version.

After all, the last time we saw the Hornet was eleven years ago, which is decades in Hollywood terms.