In A Better Universe, We Would've Gotten More Of The Phantom – And More Treat Williams
Before the superhero boom of the 2000s, there was the vintage pulp hero boom of the 1990s. The likes of "Dick Tracy" and "The Shadow" brought their source material to splashy cinematic life as visually striking and resplendently silly action adventures, often to, at best, mixed critical and financial returns. So it also was with perhaps the most unabashedly irreverent of their ranks, 1996's "The Phantom."
Directed by Simon Wincer, the big-screen take on Lee Falk's '30s comic strip casts Cal Hockley himself, Billy Zane, as Kit Walker, a beefy gent who dons a body-tight purple suit and black face mask to battle evil-doers during the '30s as The Phantom. Opposing Kit is the late, great Treat Williams as Xander Drax, a dastardly industrialist pursuing a trio of mystical skulls that will allow him to rule over humanity. (Why? Well, somebody's got to do it, I suppose.) Throw in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie star Kristy Swanson as Kit's ex-girlfriend, the plucky Diana Palmer, a pre-fame Catherine Zeta-Jones as Xander's wicked sidekick Sala, and a jungle island setting full of booby-trapped secret locations, and what do you get? The perfect recipe for a rip-roaring 100 minutes of campy derring-do, that's what!
"The Phantom" bombed at the box office and divided critics, but it's always had its champions. My man Roger Ebert, never one to turn his nose up at a hokey safari adventure with a sense of humor about itself, even heralded it as "one of the best-looking movies in a long time" in his review. Thankfully, the entire cast is on the same wavelength when it comes to the film's tongue-in-cheek tone, though perhaps none more than Williams. He all but twirls his mustache as the movie's villain, delivering ridiculous lines like "What a cheap jungle trick!" with unreserved relish.
'Many of us have killed him over the years. But he keeps coming back'
If the PG-rated "The Phantom" plays as a relatively kid-friendly "Indiana Jones" movie, that's only to be expected. Simon Wincer had already made his name helming family movies ("Free Willy," "Operation Dumbo Drop") and Westerns ("Quigley Down Under," "Lightning Jack") that lacked the edginess of Steven Spielberg's original trilogy of globe-trotting serial adventure films. "The Phantom" was even scripted by "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" co-writer Jeffrey Boam, which also explains why it goes so heavy on the winking comedy. Unfortunately, this just wasn't the type of entertainment audiences were in the mood for back in the mid-'90s, so its potential sequels were scrapped.
Nevertheless, speaking to ComicBook.com in 2021, Billy Zane confirmed he would absolutely be game to take another crack at the property. Interestingly, The Phantom itself is a moniker that's been passed down from father to son for hundreds of years, so the franchise's lore even lends itself to a legacy sequel. Moreover, Zane noted the traits that make the Phantom an outlier and easy to mock when stacked up against most modern superheroes would, ironically, actually help him stand out more in today's cinematic landscape:
"[I] dug him because he didn't have superpowers, really. It was just kind of super-humane. Again, that moral compass could be a nice reminder. So, right out of the comic universe, I'd say that character would be a hoot."
A "Phantom" movie reboot was announced in 2008 but appears to have since died on the vine. Sadly, the odds of a sequel to Wincer's film are low as well, despite the cult following it's gained over the decades since its theatrical release. Still, there's nothing stopping you from seeking out the original, which is available on most PVOD services.