Exclusive: Brad Pitt Attached To League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Reboot
No, as far as we know he isn’t reprising his extremely short-lived role of the Vanisher in Deadpool 3 (but you never know). Instead, our trusted and proven sources have informed us Brad Pitt is attached to star in a reboot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Coming from the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios, this will mark Pitt’s first time as the star of a Disney comic book adaptation.
We’ve exclusively learned Brad Pitt is attached to star in a reboot of 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
We don’t yet have a lot of details about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reboot beyond Brad Pitt’s casting, which makes the question of who he might be playing an intriguing one. Our first, best guess would be that Pitt would be replacing the late Sean Connery as adventurer Allan Quartermain.
In both the film and the comics, Quartermain is one of the only members of the first group without any superhuman abilities, and he’s extremely reluctant to get involved in the whole affair.
However, the nature of both the comics and the 2003 film complicate things. First, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen screen adaptation wasn’t shy about deviating from the source material. Both Dorian Gray — from the 1891 Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray — and Mark Twain’s iconic Tom Sawyer appear in the film as protagonists, even though neither are part of the group in the comics.
Likewise while Mina Harker in both the comics and the movie were victims of Dracula, only Peta Wilson’s version in the film is granted any super powers from the encounter.
So while the franchise may be most closely associated with the Victorian era, whatever character Brad Pitt is playing — along with those played by his colleagues — could be pulled from any century, including ones we haven’t experienced yet.
Meaning that while Allan Quartermain seems the most natural fit from the source material for Brad Pitt to play, there’s no guarantee The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reboot will stick to the source material.
The possibility seems even more likely when you consider that Quartermain is an English hero, and Pitt has a spotty reputation with roles requiring non-American accents. His character’s speech in Guy Ritchie‘s Snatch may be one of the best parts of the film, but his “Irish” accent in 1997’s The Devil’s Own is one of the most famously unconvincing accents in cinematic history.
There’s also the fact that while 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is set in the late 19th century like the first comics published in 1999, the series has since gone far beyond that century. In the comics, the story spans three limited series, two League original graphic novels, and the spin-off original graphic novels The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Nemo Trilogy. Time-wise, the stories take place in the 19th, 20th, 21st, and even distant 30th centuries.
So while the franchise may be most closely associated with the Victorian era, whatever character Brad Pitt is playing — along with those played by his colleagues — could be pulled from any century, including ones we haven’t experienced yet.
The Origins Of The League
The first The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics were written by Alan Moore and with art by Kevin O’Neill, originally falling under DC Comics‘ Wildstorm imprint. The first two limited series followed a kind of Victorian-era Justice League made up of characters like the Invisible Man, Nemo, and Mr. Hyde.
Their last comic from the franchise was the 2019 limited series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest, which both Moore and O’Neill said would be their last time working in comics as a whole.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film, which Brad Pitt is rebooting, premiered in 2003, going toe-to-toe with The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. While it wasn’t exactly a flop, The League underperformed commercially and the critics tore it to pieces.
