“Fast & Furious” and “xXx” producer Neal Moritz will spearhead a small-screen take on the “Doc Savage” pulp fiction franchise from Street & Smith.
Moritz’s Original Film has teamed with Sony Pictures Television and Condé Nast Entertainment to develop a scripted television series that’ll “chronicle [Doc Savage’s] adventures, featuring rampaging dinosaurs, secret societies led by dastardly villains, fantastic gadgets and weapons, death-dealing traps, hair-raising escapes, and plots to rule the earth”, says Deadline.
Sony and Original Film first partnered on a “Doc Savage” movie, which Shane Black was attached to write, and Dwayne Johnson set to headline, several years back. In a 2018 interview, Johnson noted that the project had cooled off.
While trying to get the feature off the ground, Moritz began contemplating a small-screen adaptation. He felt like, with hundreds of characters and myriad stories featured in the books, the Doc Savage IP would be better served as a TV series where there is more time to explore characters.
In the ’80s, movie producers were hot to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as the character.