'The Green Hornet' Reboot Coming From 'The Accountant' Director Gavin O'Connor

The Green Hornet is getting another chance on the big screen. While Michel Gondry and Seth Rogen's 2011 superhero comedy didn't quite connect with audiences and critics, director Gavin O'Connor (The Accountant) plans on taking the character in a completely different direction for Paramount Studios. The Miracle and Warrior director wants to make his version of Brett Reid "a hunter at the top of the Special Operations food chain."

Below, learn more about The Green Hornet reboot.

According to Deadline, the director is producing the Paramount film and now working closely with screenwriter Sean O'Keefe (Riders on the Storm) on a draft of the script. O'Connor, known for his typically grounded movies, wants to wipe "away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration" and "re-mythologize The Green Hornet in a contemporary context."

According to the director, he's been wanting to make this comic book adaptation for a long time:

I've been wanting to make this movie— and create this franchise— since I've wanted to make movies. As a kid, when most of my friends were into Superman and Batman, there was only one superhero who held my interest— The Green Hornet. I always thought he was the baddest badass because he had no superpowers. The Green Hornet was a human superhero. And he didn't wear a clown costume. And he was a criminal— in the eyes of the law— and in the eyes of the criminal world. So all this felt real to me. Imagine climbing to the top of the Himalayas, or Mount Everest, or K2 over and over again and no one ever knew? You can never tell anybody. That's the life of Britt and Kato. What they do, they can never say. They don't take credit for anything.

O'Connor went on to explain his vision for Fran Striker and George W. Trendle's character, who made his debut on radio in 1936 before showing up in other mediums:

For almost twenty years now I've been tracking the rights, watching from the sidelines as they were optioned by one studio or another. When I discovered the rights were available again, I tracked them down, partnered with Peter Chernin and we set the movie up at Paramount. With the rights now in our loving hands, I'm beyond excited to bring The Green Hornet into the 21st century in a meaningful and relevant way; modernizing it and making it accessible to a whole new generation. My intention is to bring a gravitas to The Green Hornet that wipes away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration. I want to re-mythologize The Green Hornet in a contemporary context, with an emphasis on story and character, while at the same time, incorporating themes that speak to my heart. The comic book movie is the genre of our time. How do we look at it differently? How do we create a distinctive film experience that tells itself differently than other comic book movies? How do we land comfortably at the divide between art and industry? How do we go deeper, prompt more emotion? How do we put a beating heart into the character that was never done before? These are my concerns...these are my desires, my intentions, my fears, my goals.

The director describes The Green Hornet as a story about self-discovery:

When we meet Britt Reid he's lost faith in the system. Lost faith in service. In institutions. If that's the way the world works, that's what the world's going to get. He's a man at war with himself. A secret war of self that's connected to the absence of his father. It's the dragon that's lived with him that he needs to slay. And the journey he goes on to become The Green Hornet is the dramatization of it, and becomes Britt's true self. I think of this film as Batman upside down meets Bourne inside out by way of Chris Kyle [American Sniper].

The Chris Kyle comparison is a tad unexpected, but Brett Reid will have a military background in the film, "which is more CIA Special Activities Division than Seal Team 6," according to O'Connor. This new iteration of the character sounds about as far away as one can get from Seth Rogen's unconventional take on the hero. That 2011 superhero comedy was a crucial lesson for Rogen, who later decided to stay away from movies that expensive, but hopefully O'Connor, a fine director coming off his first box-office hit (The Accountant) in a while, fares better with the Green Hornet and Kato.