Sony Nears Agreement on Captain Planet Movie Deal

On my list of ’90s properties that really deserve a modern reboot but mysteriously haven’t gotten one yet, it’s Captain Planet. It’s certainly not the weirdest thing to ever try to capture the imaginations of kids in the 1990s, after all, I mean there was a Pac man show, Street Sharks, Road Rovers, and The Mighty Ducks cartoon. But the idea such a show could make it to a network release with the flabbergastingly heavy handed environmental message and a superhero whose secret weakness was the same as the disasters he sought to prevent and actually be pretty memorable and enjoyable for kids, well. Who among people my age does not get the Planeteers rap stuck in their head from time to time? Who among us cannot recite the whole thing from memory? Who among us remembers when Linka stopped being from the USSR and started being from Eastern Europe? Remember when they fought Hitler?

Cartoon Network announced they had a Captain Planet reboot in development two years ago, but that was about the extent of the movement on that front. But now word comes from The Hollywood Reporter, that “Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to pick up the rights to the early 1990s series for an adaptation to be produced by Mark Gordon, Don Murphy and Susan Montford.” Murphy and Montford are two of the folks who attempted to get the Cartoon Network reboot off the ground in 2011.

Since Sony hasn’t even reached licensing rights just yet there’s naturally not a whisper of a script, writer, or director, so there’s little to fuel speculation on the tone or details of the eventual, possible, production. But I know how I’d want it to go:

Five human children raised in isolation by the mysterious spirit Gaia now face the responsibility of their ultimate purpose: reaching out to humanity and convincing it to change it’s polluting ways before it’s too late. At the same time, they feel compelled to solve the worst of the man-made natural disasters by summoning a dangerously amoral, nigh omnipotent entity and hoping desperately that he saves more lives than he takes.

And as I’ve said before, this is why Hollywood doesn’t pay me to write movies.

(via The Hollywood Reporter.)