This wouldn’t have been Goyer’s first tango with Fury. In 1995, when the rights to the character and the government law enforcement agency he headed up, S.H.I.E.L.D. (which, after 1991, stood for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate), were owned by 20th Century Fox, Goyer was hired to write a theatrical feature. According to Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards’ “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” Goyer blended the best elements of Fury’s various incarnations. “It was a fairly representative adaptation of the [Jim] Steranko era,” he said, “But updated with Baron von Strucker and the Satan Claw and all sorts of things like that.”
Fox consigned Goyer’s draft to development hell, but a few years later the studio circled back and asked if he’d be interested in writing a “backdoor” television pilot that would, if nothing else, get aired as a TV movie. Goyer, whose script required a minimum $20 million budget, was not keen on rewriting it as a $6 million slam job starring David Hasselhoff, and thus demurred. As he told Robinson, Gonzales and Edwards:
“At the time it did shoot, I was running my own short-lived series, ‘Sleepwalkers.’ I was also initially unenthused about Hasselhoff’s involvement. I think the film was pretty mediocre, but Hasselhoff turned out to be the best thing in it. He got the joke. The script was meant to be very tongue in cheek, and Hasselhoff understood that.”
Goyer probably figured he was done with Fury at this point, but he had one last shot to do the character big-screen justice. Alas, he was Begin-ing another journey.
There was a Nick Fury movie in the works at DreamWorks, but due to the splintered nature of rights in the early Marvel era, we never saw it. Read More