Superhero movies are an easy cash cow for just about every studio out there, whether they be big or small. While it's easy to look at Marvel's The Avengers and see the $600M domestic haul as a definite win, everybody is clamoring to find their own little superhero niche to try and exploit. For Marvel, who have already taken a lesser hero like Iron Man to great heights, it means trying to do the same for the likes of C-listers like Ant-Man and The Inhumans. For DC and Warner Brothers....well, it's friggin' Lobo and Metal Men. But those characters at least have some name recognition, no matter how slight. What about The Human Fly? Any Human Fly fans out there? Didn't think so.
Regardless, a film based on The Human Fly is headed to the big screen, and one has to wonder why. There have been two Human Fly characters, both originating in the 1970s under the Marvel Comics banner. One was a villain, who was a frequent foe of Spider-Man and Moon Knight, and currently still runs around the Marvel Universe causing trouble.
But it's the other that will be headed into theaters, and his story is a bit more interesting. First off, the character is a hero based on a real life person, a stuntman named Rick Rojatt. In his short-lived 19 issue series, The Human Fly was an unknown guy who is severely injured in a car crash, only to have much of his skeleton reconstructed with steel. He would then recover, become the masked Human Fly, and start performing daredevil stunts for charities, which drew the attention of both heroes and villains.Alan Brewer and Steven Goldman picked up the rights to the character, with the latter directing. The script will be written by Tony Babinski, who also happens to be the in-house historian for Cirque Du Soleil. Seriously. In case they ever need to know the history of the tightrope, he's the guy they call. To the best of my knowledge, the Human Fly hero was only a licensed property for Marvel, so it reverted back to Rojatt, which is when Brewer and Goldman swooped in. So this won't be a Marvel production proper, which means you can probably expect it to have a very limited budget. [Deadline]
