Did The Spirit Need Frank Miller?

Right now I’m sure most people have Batman on their minds, and don’t even remember that a movie based on The Spirit, by Will Eisner, is set to come out on December 25th of this year. But is there even a reason people should be looking forward to this?

The history of a movie adaptation of The Spirit is a very interesting one. The rights for a movie were obtained in the early 90’s by Michael Uslan, who is most famous for being a producer on every single Batman movie from 1989 onwards. Uslan promised the comic book deity, Will Eisner, that he would not give the project to anyone who didn’t “get it”, since Eisner was very protective of his creations.

A decade and several scrapped screenplays later, multi-Eisner award winner Jeph Loeb is tapped to write a screenplay for The Spirit but drops out shortly after. Later that same month at a memorial service for Will Eisner, who died a few months prior, Uslan approached Frank Miller.

Now don’t get me wrong, Frank Miller is a great writer/director/multi-talented individual, but I don’t think that he is right for The Spirit. Eisner wanted someone who “got” his work to be at the helm, and Miller doesn’t “get it”. While his hyper stylized, digital background is great for Sin City, it doesn’t fit here. Based on trailers thus far The Spirit looks like a carbon copy of everything that is Sin City with different characters. Miller even said himself in an interview in 2006:

“I intend to be extremely faithful to the heart and soul of the material, but it won’t be nostalgic. It will be much scarier than people expect.”

There you go, straight from the director/writer’s mouth, this movie will not be The Spirit you remember, but what he would be if Frank Miller is at the helm. I’m not saying that violence or interpretation are bad, but Eisner deserves to have his work represented the way he created and intended it to be. Once this movie comes out, the lines between Eisner’s and Miller’s image of The Spirit will become blurred in the minds of the ignorant public.

Perhaps this is the reason Jeph Loeb stepped out of writing the screenplay. Maybe he felt he didn’t “get it”, but I think as far as “getting it” goes that Loeb “gets it” much more than Miller “gets it”. Oh, how I wish Loeb had stayed…