Samuel L. Jackson says he may not come back at Nick Fury according to one of those runway interviews, which would be sad, because Fury was in the Iron Man movie and would potentially be a big part of that all-star AVengers flick everyone is drooling over. The reason? Marvel is playing hardball with the budget, Geoff Boucher reports. Says Jackson:
“There was a huge kind of negotiation that broke down. I don’t know. Maybe I won’t be Nick Fury. Maybe somebody else will be Nick Fury or maybe Nick Fury won’t be in it. There seems to be an economic crisis in the Marvel Comics world so [they’re saying to me], ‘We’re not making that deal.'”
I [Boucher] called Marvel Comics and they gave me a statement that suggested that they still want to see Jackson wearing the eyepatch. “Marvel does not comment on active negotiations,” was the boilerplate repsonse, but there was that emphasis on the word “active” in the voice of the spokesman who phoned me back.
Oh dear.
Oh poo.
They might have to cast someone who can act.
Is Hasselhoff within their budget? He looked more like the Nick Fury I know.
Jack Black. Just the name itself is intimidating to some…. and a cameo of Jim Steranko appearing from nowhere…
Agreed, Andrew. Jackson hasn’t been good since Frozone. He was a great Glass, but he’s phoned it in since. Maybe he was decent in Black Snake Moan…. He’s repeatedly disappointed me in recent years. If he’s smart, he’ll suck it up and sign a deal.
Well, I hear Terrence Howard is available…
I would certainly hope that neither side, Jackson nor Marvel, are getting *too* ridiculous in the negotiations. Yes, an Avengers movie wouldn’t work without Jackson as Fury, but then again, the Iron Man movie probably wouldn’t have worked without Robert Downey, Jr. Fans (ie: people other than the posters above 8^P ) are going to expect Jackson as Fury, but at the same time, Jackson shouldn’t hold Marvel over a barrel just because he knows that we all know that. I mean, we all know that due to obvious immense cost of VFX, the equitable solution is to simply make sure that Downey, Jackson, Norton and any other headliners get paid the same, which would likely be a nominal fee (like $1 million) versus some sort of percentage of the gross-before-any-sort-of-Hollywood-Accounting-stupidity. Same with the DVDs and merchandising such as the inevitable action figures.
Say it ain’t so!
I’m sure the movie would do okay without him, but it just wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be the same at all. You don’t want to cast some bit-player actor as Fury, even if he doesn’t have a lot of screentime and doesn’t wear unstable molecule spandex – he needs to be able to hold his ground and then some, charisma-wise, with the superheroes.
What’s everyone so down on Sam Jackson for? Isn’t Marvel right now playing similar hardball with Jon Favreau, the Iron Man director for which the Iron Man movie wouldn’t work? I have a feeling this is less an issue of Jackson’s demands being excessive (think of all the movies he’s been in, after all; I don’t think that any of them ever broke the bank over his salary — he was in “Snakes on a Plane,” for God’s sake) and more of an issue of Marvel being ridiculously stingy with their money.
He won’t be missed. The average joe on the street ( and this includes one of my neighbors ) doesn’t even have the patience to sit through six minutes of credits to see some extra rabid fanboy drooling scene in a movie.
Only “we” got to see it.
So people are walking around aimlessly scratching their noggins and are probably busy being perplexed on the character of Nick Fury.
Nice parody on Robot Chicken, though.
~
Coat
El Santo: I don’t think Marvel is necessarily trying to be stingy. As impatient as I am with both sides since this news broke, one thing that I keep reminding myself is that even if Favs and all of the actors were going to be working for free, this is still going to be one jawdroppingly expensive movie even for a summer tentpole movie.
Clearly, they’re all going to get paid something, but it seems to me that this is simply going to be one ginormous headache of a series of negotiations with not just Jackson, but with everyone else, too — and it’s not really about it being a shared-universe movie with so many different properties (Marvel owns all of them, except for just the movie rights to the Hulk) but because it’s a shared-universe movie of A-List (and/or B-Plus-List) stars who are certainly going to want (and deserve to get) similar deals to other actors in the movie. So I would hazard a guess that when they’re negotiating with one actor, they’re playing 3-D chess with all of the other actors (and Favs) at the same time. Except that the only way to win this 3D chess game is when everybody wins.