Quentin Tarantino has had an impressive career in Hollywood since Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992, but the majority of the movies he’s directed have been based on his own original ideas. This means he has yet to direct a superhero movie, which get increasingly popular with each passing year. However, if you’ve listened to him in interviews, Tarantino is a longtime comic book fan, and for a time he had his eye on helming a movie about a Marvel hero he admired as a child.
While chatting on The Nerdist Podcast, Tarantino revealed that at one point he was eager to direct a movie about Luke Cage, a Marvel mainstay since 1972. The director said:
One of the outside projects that I considered doing was a Luke Cage movie. Luke Cage was my hero when I was a kid collecting comic books. He was my favorite character, and I always made [the comics] into a movie in my head every time I [read] them.
In the comics, Luke was a man framed for a crime and sent to Seagate Prison. While there, he was recruited into an experimental cellular generation program, but as is typical in comic book stories, the experiment didn’t go as intended. Luke was subsequently imbued with super strength and indestructible skin. If Tarantino had brought Luke Cage to the big screen, obviously it would have been a hard R, extremely violent affair like his other movies, thus making it a no-go for kids. To separate it from the crowd, no doubt Luke’s time operating Heroes for Hire would have been featured (where he used his powers to help people in exchange for money), and if we were lucky, maybe his longtime partner Iron Fist could have popped in to tear it up with Luke on the streets of New York.
This isn’t the only Marvel project Quentin Tarantino had been connected to. Back when Iron Man was trying to get made, Tarantino was one of the many directors considered for the project, though as we all know, that title eventually went to Jon Favreau. While a Luke Cage movie never became reality, the character has finally been realized in live action thanks to television, being one of the four leading heroes over in Netflix corner of the MCU. Played by The Good Wife’s Mike Colter, he debuted on Jessica Jones last month, and his solo series is set to air sometime next year. Since Netflix has become Marvel’s way of telling darker and more mature stories, Luke Cage will surely be more graphic compared to Marvel’s movies and ABC offerings, though it will never reach the levels Tarantino goes to in his movies.
We may never see Tarantino tackle a superhero adventure, but you can catch his new film, The Hateful Eight, in theaters on December 25.
