Early this morning I was reading Katey's piece on Cinema Blend telling us that Sony was going forward with a movie called Pan, a Channing Tatum Peter Pan origin story of sorts and I just kept (figuratively) scratching my head and other sources confirm this is happening. Katey and I are of like minds on this one as we both like Tatum more than you'd think ...and more than perhaps is reasonable *ahem*. But the project just makes zero sense on paper. Or at least on paper in simple high concept form.
What to make of it all? Can't we leave Peter Pan to little boy actors? Though I feel like this should go without saying maybe Hollywood needs a little schooling. "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" is a conceptual metaphor. Peter Pan is not a literal story. Yes, it's about men who can't leave boyhood behind but that's the emotional gist. It's not literal. Peter Pan can but should NEVER be played by full grown men. Maybe my resistance to this is all that deep scarring from the hideous Hook twenty years ago. Christ that movie was awful. While Channing Tatum is a good ten years younger than Robin Williams was for Steven Spielberg's nadir, 30 is still too old to play Pan. Just when Hollywood had finally dropped the habit of having mature women play the flying boy do we have to have mature men take over?
I mean even back when Channing Tatum was a male model and several lbs leaner he was still way too, um, how to put this... carnal for Pan, you know? Unless they're making an entirely different movie than we think they're making!
This is not the only Peter Pan movie in development as Hollywood never stops beating its dead horses franchises and Peter Pan is in the public domain so anyone can take a crack at it. There's another movie in development that is also possibly called "Pan" which is also about a grown man although that one seems to use Peter Pan only as a skeletal concept, like Emma to Clueless or some such.
P.S. Speaking of Peter Pan, I met 2003's Tinkerbell yesterday but I have to hold the interview till the summer when her movie opens, damnit.