A Rejected James Gunn Script Nearly Teamed Up Two Comedic Titans In The 1990s

James Gunn seemingly reached the nerd mountaintop upon becoming the co-chairman (with Peter Safran) of DC Studios in 2022. Nearly 30 years before that, however, he was just another struggling screenwriter slugging it out in the film industry trenches. Gunn earned his first screenplay credit as the co-writer of Troma Entertainment's "Tromeo and Juliet," which was not the calling-card effort that put him on Hollywood's radar. That would be his script for "The Specials," a superhero comedy that became a film under the direction of Craig Mazin in 2000.

Before that film was even made, though, Gunn found himself pitching projects to the major studios, one of which was a Silver Surfer movie at 20th Century Fox. Gunn knocked out a treatment that he once claimed was a "huge story, cosmic as hell," and he might've hung around to write the screenplay had another project not been dropped on his doorstep.

In 1999, filmmaker Jay Roach, riding high thanks to the "Austin Powers" movies, and producer Shauna Robertson approached Gunn about writing a screenplay based on the sabotage-happy exploits of Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy." Created by Antonio Prohías, the comic strip featured two cone-faced agents, one dressed in black and the other in white, who undermined each other via Rube Goldberg-esque traps. It was one of the most consistently clever features in Mad, but it was awfully short on plot and, thus, not the kind of cartoon that easily lent itself to a feature film adaptation.

Gunn figured "Spy vs. Spy" had a better chance of getting greenlit (as Fox was waiting on the 2000 release of "X-Men" to determine its comic book movie strategy going forward), so he exited the Silver Surfer flick and took on "Spy vs. Spy." In the end, the latter almost got made with two hugely talented and popular actors in the titular roles.

When Warner Bros. announced in 2020 that it had hired Rawson Marshall Thurber ("Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story") to write and direct a "Spy vs. Spy" movie, Gunn took to Twitter to briefly recall the time he spent on the project over 20 years prior. He revealed (in a since-deleted post) that he wrote his script with Nicholas Cage and Eddie Murphy in mind, and that, among the wildest bits in the film, there was a protracted scene wherein the spys hook their brains up to a machine that turns them into cats for a significant chunk of the movie.

"Minions" screenwriter Brian Lynch recalled on Twitter that Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans were apparently set to star in Roach's movie at one point, but, ultimately, this iteration of the project fell apart. Roach moved on to direct "Meet the Parents," and Gunn was hired to rewrite Craig Titley's screenplay for "Scooby-Doo." "Spy vs. Spy" remained dormant until 2011, when Ron Howard toyed with directing a feature adaptation from a screenplay by John Kamps ("Zathura"). This attempt fell short as well, and since it's been radio silence since we got an update on Thurbur's movie, it's probably safe to assume that version is dead, too.

"Spy vs. Spy" is such a simple, ingenious concept (made all the more effective by its lack of dialogue) that I can only imagine Hollywood mucking it up. Perhaps, for this project, dead is better.