According to The Tracking Board, Chris Hemsworth (The Avengers, Snow White and the Huntsman) is currently circling a new spec script version of H. Rider Haggard’s pulp adventure character Allan Quatermain as written Barnett Brettler (20 Mississippi). Power agency CAA is in the process of trying to attach Hemsworth to the project, which Sony Pictures is already considering to acquire. Hemsworth was previously attached to play another pulp hero in Shane Black’s big screen version of Doc Savage, although little movement has been made on that project since.
First appearing in the 1885 novel “King Solomon’s Mines,” the adventurer Quatermain appeared in 14 novels penned by Haggard through 1927. The Englishman is a big game hunter and a marksman without equal, spending most of his years in South Africa during the colonial era. Although described in his first appearance as being 55 with a wiry frame and pointy white beard, none of the motion picture adaptations have stayed true to that description, although Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” comics do. Quatermain was a chief inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones.
The character of Quatermain has seen many adaptations over the years, starting with the Stewart Granger-led 1950 version of King Solomon’s Mines. In the mid-eighties Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone co-starred in two Quatermain movies, shot back-to-back by the infamous Cannon Films as a cash-in on the Indiana Jones craze. The late Patrick Swayze also played the character in a two-part miniseries version of “Mines” for the Hallmark Channel in 2004, while Sean Connery made The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen his cinematic swan song in 2003, although that film’s version of an elderly Quatermain bared little resemblance to the drug-addled version of Moore’s comic book.
While Hemsworth has yet to officially attach himself to Allan Quatermain, he will next be seen in Ron Howard’s similarly 1800s-set In the Heart of the Sea in December, and then in The Huntsman Winter’s War. He will play a secretary named Kevin in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot, and will reprise his phenomenally-popular title role in Marvel’s 2017 sequel Thor: Ragnarok.
(Photo credit: WENN)
