These Storyboards From the Unmade ‘Silver Surfer’ Movie Are Awesome
I’m a big fan of comic book and storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman; one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever run here on ScreenCrush was an interview with him where he shared some of his favorite boards from movies while giving some insight into the process of being a storyboard artist.
Occasionally, Hardman shares more of these storyboards on Twitter, and yesterday he posted a fun thread of all the movies he had done storyboards for that never quite came to fruition. The unmade movies include the famous Dieter, which Mike Myers was going to make based on his popular Saturday Night Live character, a remake of Logan’s Run by Bryan Singer, and a an earlier iteration of John Carter of Mars that would have been directed by Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’s Kerry Conran.
Still, the most intriguing of the bunch was a movie based on Marvel’s Silver Surfer. According to Hardman “Romper Stomper’s Geoffrey [Wright] was directing. He wanted Ewan McGregor as Surfer and Steven Berkoff as Galactus.” Then today, Hardman actually posted some of the storyboards from the movie. See for yourself:
Obviously the movie never happened, and perhaps that’s for the best, since Hardman also noted on Twitter that the Silver Surfer would have had to spend most of the movie looking like a human being because “vfx would have been too costly then.” This chunk of the film looks pretty cool, though; obviously he’s not in human being form here.
To this day, the Surfer hasn’t gotten his own movie, although he did play a crucial role in Fox’s 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The film wasn’t great overall, but the Surfer looked surprisingly impressive, at least given the standard of the time. Now that Disney owns Fox, everyone is waiting for the character to return to the big screen, but Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi recently announced the Surfer won’t show up in his movie despite rumors to the contrary. Maybe someone over at Marvel will see these awesome storyboards, and get itchy to bring the character back. There’s always Phase Five.
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