Quentin Tarantino Reveals The One Marvel Comic He Would Turn Into A Movie
Quentin Tarantino says he would jump at the chance to adapt Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos to the big screen.
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In a recent event promoting his new book, Cinema Speculation, director Quentin Tarantino revealed what Marvel comic that he’d turn into a movie. Despite having previously taken the position that he’d never direct a movie for Marvel Studios, Tarantino admitted that the only title he’d consider was Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. According to ComicBook.com, Tarantino was asked what movie he’d consider directing by film critic and comic book fan Elvis Mitchell.
Longtime comic fans will recall that Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos was a World War II-set comic published in the 1960s featuring Nick Fury and the soldiers, fighting Nazis in Europe. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Howling Commandos appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger, with Cap taking on the Nick Fury role of leading the unit, as Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury–unlike the comic book original–was not active during WWII.
Jackson, of course, is a regular feature of Quentin Tarantino films, appearing in Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Despite this connection to the MCU’s Nick Fury, Tarantino has repeatedly said that he’d never direct a film for Marvel. “You have to be a hired hand to do those things,” Tarantino has said. “I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”
In a way, Quentin Tarantino has already made his Howling Commandos movie. Speaking with MTV in 2009 during the release of his feature film Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino admitted that the classic 1960s Marvel comic was an influence on him for that movie. Certainly the plot of the film, involving a plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler during a film screening in occupied Paris, is exactly the sort of over-the-top action that the comic book featured.
Quentin Tarantino has been linked to comic book adaptations in the past. During the earlier years of his career, he was attached to a possible film version of Luke Cage, stating that he was always a fan of the Hero For Hire era of the Cage character, which he described as Marvel’s attempt to do a blacksploitation movie as a superhero comic.
His name was also floated in connection with a potential Silver Surfer film in the 90s, largely due to a sequence in 1995’s submarine thriller, Crimson Tide — a film where Tarantino was an uncredited script doctor. In the film, the first officer character, portrayed by Denzel Washington, has a pop-cultural debate with a sailor about the Silver Surfer, noting that the “Kirby Silver Surfer is the one true Silver Surfer.”
Those potential comic book adaptations were in the early years of his career, and Quentin Tarantino, famously, is now nearing the end. The director has said that his next feature film, his tenth, will be his last film before retiring from the profession entirely. Whether that tenth and final film is the much-rumored Kill Bill 3, or something else entirely, we can be sure at least that it will most likely not be a film for Marvel Studios.
