Paul Giamatti Suggests That The Goon Movie May Be Dead
We've been waiting years for Eric Powell's The Goon to finally get made into a feature film. Back in the summer of 2008, David Fincher optioned the rights to Powell's series to turn it into an animated film and at Comic Con 2010 we even got to see some test footage that they made featuring the voices of Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown (as Franky and The Goon, respectively). Since then we've heard updates here and there, like in January of last year when Fincher said, "Animation that isn’t singing furry animals is hard." Now the latest news arrived and unfortunately it's not positive.
Giamatti is currently down in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival promoting his new film John Dies At The End, and IFC had the chance to speak with him and get the latest on what's happening with The Goon. Sadly, it sounds like nobody has stepped up to finance the project. "I have no idea what the hell happened,” Giamatti said. "I asked and no one knows. I guess they just ran out of money." The movie was to be produced by Fincher with Powell writing the script and the animation being done by Blur Studios. In the on-going comic, Goon and Franky inhabit a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies (aka slackjaws), robotos (aka Brunos), Ogres (aka Bog Lurks) and cannibals.
This obviously doesn't spell good things for the project, but the best we can hope for is that Giamatti just doesn't have all of the info. The Goon has yet to get financing, but it's entirely possible that the dream is being kept alive and the folks behind it are still trying to find a money source. At this point we just have to pray that somebody out there is still trying to get the movie made.
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Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.