Man-Thing: The Marvel Horror Flick
I know Jared Leto’s Morbius is coming out, but did you know it was part of a deal Marvel signed in 2000?
In August 1940, Theodore Sturgeon released It, a short story about a family of farmer having to fight off a human/plant hybrid. This short story, and its swayed prose, would spawn a bunch of such mutant throughout American comics book history but it would be in 1971 that the real duel would take place. In May 1971, in Savage Tales #1, Man-thing made his first appearance, followed two months later by Swamp Thing who first appeared in House of Secrets #92. Both those first appearances were one-shots, as was usual at the time. Both tales told a chemist becoming a human/plant hybrid after having fallen in a swamp, and this was rarer. Also, Man-Thing was created by Marvel, while Swamp Thing was created by DC. Ouch.
Still, on year later, in October 1972, both creatures would begin their first solo venture. This used to happen, in fact, this was how Ant-man was created, first as a one-shot which pleased the readers enough for Jack Kirby to decide to turn it into a whole series. History has it, this is why both publishers never fought around copyright infringement, that and the fact that a creature named the Heap already existed and nobody wanted its creator to come take a closer look.
“Whatever Knows Fear Burns at the Touch of the Man-Thing.”
With the main differences between the two characters being that Man-Thing secrets an acid which burns fearful enemies to the touch, how did it come that most people know of DC’s Swamp Thing and less of its Marvel counterpart? I guess, this comes down to Alan Moore, of Watchmen fame, having revamped the monster during the 80s, turning it from a scientist turned plant to a plant believing it was a scientist. Moore’s run of the comic book is awesome, presenting the Hell that Neil Gaiman will next exploit through its Sandman creation, inventing Constantine along the line and reviving Etrigan and Deadman.
This may be why Man-thing always appeared as minor character throughout the Marvel universe, even though it got its fair share of fans, don’t take me wrong, while DC’s Swamp Thing got the Wes Craven adaptation, starring Adrienne Barbeau — and do not forget its infamous sequel — and a tv series produced by James Wan which ultimately fell short.
Still, nowadays, with Disney acquiring Marvel and being the main force behind all of children entertainment it seems, it appears pretty difficult to imagine a time when Marvel’s Stan Lee had to star in Larry Cohen’s The Ambulance or the tumultuous beginnings of the Marvel movie franchises whom consequences can still be felt.
In the early 2000, Artisan Entertainment struck a deal with Marvel and acquired 15 intellectual properties. Those included Captain America, Ant-man, Black Panther, The Punisher, Morbius, Deadpool and, yeah, Man-Thing. Both companies thought this were small franchises which could still be built upon whether by movies or tv series. Future would teach us that both Deadpool and Black Panther were not small properties, or maybe this was a timely affair. We will never know.
What we do know is that Artisan Entertainment was founded in 1981 under the name Family Home Entertainment when a porn distributor thought it’d be wise to infiltrate the kiddie stuff distribution scheme. In 1984, Bloom, the owner’s name, turned Family Home Entertainment into I’VE (International Video Entertainment). In 86, the company was bought by Carolco Pictures which put a certain Menendez at the helm of it. The new man-in-charge changed the company’s name another time, renaming it LIVE before dying alongside his wife of several shot to the face in his bed. This tarnished the company’s reputation who survived anyway made it through to the 90s’ while acquiring a big back catalogue of titles before collapsing in 1993. This would be a good thing, because while the market of home media began to crumble, LIVE began to turn around and produce its own movie. To further this shift, it would rename itself Artisan Entertainment in 1998 and produce famous movies such as the Blair Witch Project, Pi, Killing Zoe, The Punisher (not the 1989 one) before signing this deal with Marvel. In 2003, Lionsgate would go on to acquire a struggling Artisan Entertainment and this would certainly play a role in the story I’m going to tell now.
Of their 15 Marvel license deal, Artisan had made TWO movies, the Punisher and Man-Thing…
Even without any other explanation what we do know is that the screenwriter of Man-Thing really wanted to honour the creature and we also know it’s Marvel who approved of the design based on a skull and missing the usual three tentacles their trademark creature always featured. We also know that the film was filmed in Sidney, and that a manmade swamp was built for it. We know the production enrolled unknown Australian actors to stay in budget, even though the making-of would tell you they wrote a new part so that Jack Thompson would play alongside his son Patrick.
Reading through every interview you could come across, all you hear seems to be “budget, budget, budget”. With Marvel Studios then CEO Avi Arrad stating that they should have micro-manage the budget but hadn’t done so because the film had been shot so far away, a sfx designer assuring us that the creature we saw was supposed to be replaced with a CGI model, and a filmmaker who once gave an interview stating that a lot of the movie had been cut thanks to budget cut. this is in some way corroborated by the production designer who said that scenes were Man-Thing would show its true power had been cut from the first draft of the script.
It may be this will to honour the first comics of the Man-Thing, using a horror story architecture which did not put the eponymous character at the forefront, that, in the end, disserved the movie. While the initial plan may very well have been a horror film slowly turning the audience’s conception of its monster upside-down, budget cut and acquisition right may have shifted the production towards a more “low-budget” approach.
Man-Thing was shot on the other side of the world during the acquisition of Artisan by Lionsgate. We also have several sources stating the budget shrunk throughout production. According to others, Lionsgate refused to distribute it widely, even though it was what was first planned after the Punisher’s success, because of the public screenings which saw the viewers walking away from the theatres. Sometimes, during 2005, a horror film which should have been a superhero flick premiered onto the Scifi Channel.
What remains is a movie most people never heard about, who had a complicated history about a character whom audiences seems to desire a tv series about.
Since we’re on the subject of Marvel horror, did you know Morbius first appearance was supposed to be in the ending of Blade? But Guillermo Del Toro being hired to direct the second installment throw those plans out the window.
