Robserecaps Twenty Three – episode 55 Will Smith & The Million Dollar Pitch
by Joe
Flash forward to 1997, a follow up to episode 46 where the Rob talks about pitching to Will Smith. As always, check out the episode for yourself!
- I will freely admit, the Rob claims his property the Mark was a hot topic in comics and movie news since 1993, and before this podcast, I had never heard of it
- This all takes place on Halloween Day 1997, Will Smith is hot off Men in Black that summer
- The option for the Mark with Tom Cruise’s production company was about to run out
- The pitch for the Mark is our main character is a degenerate gambler who stumbles upon an old man being assaulted, who as his last gesture, the old man grants our lead the powers of a god
- When the pitch was in the Tom Cruise camp (pre-1997) the only successful comic book movies were the Batman franchise, because of this, Tom wanted to change the lead to a toy maker with a utility belt, which the Rob balked at
- The Rob asked “Why would someone with the powers of a God need Batman’s utility belt?” Tom’s response, “why not?” so the utility belt was added to the script
- Tom taking on the Mission Impossible franchise resulted in him passing on the Mark, but the Rob still had to wait for the existing deal to expire
- With Tom acting opposite the likes of Gene Hackman, John Voight, Jack Nicholson, Anthony Hopkins, etc. the Rob wanted to villain of the Mark to be Sean Connery
- On Tom’s last pass, they wanted to make the Mark as a TV show, the Rob saw it as a movie, so the Rob decided to take a pass at the script
- Just like Tom before him, Will Smith was also turned down for the role of Spider-Man by James Cameron and himself had turned down the lead in the Matrix, so enter the Rob and the Mark
- Both the Matrix and the Mark were pitched to Warner Brothers, who passed on both, feeling both properties were too close to Superman
- October 31st, 1997 9am sees the Rob, Will Smith and James Lassiter at Steven Spielberg’s house, who was prepping the score for the upcoming Mask of Zorro
- In giving the Rob a tour of his grounds, Spielberg pointed out where the Clintons stayed when they visit and where the snipers hid to protect them
- The Rob knew Spielberg would pass on his script, so the next meeting was with Joe Roth of Disney Studios
- After a 90 minute lunch interview with Rolling Stone, the Rob and Will were off to meet with Bill Mechanic, the head of 20th Century Fox, who looked like Stan Van Gundy, the NBA coach
- Mechanic just came from a screening of Alien Resurrection and was very preoccupied about that and the pending ‘disaster’ that was going to be Titanic, which both had very low scores in Hollywood
- The only studio that wanted the Mark was Universal, who they never met with, ended up paying the Rob $1.1 million for the script
- By February of 1998, Universal almost had Spielberg on board to produce, later shifting to Roland Emmerich & Dean Devlin. Devlin, at the premiere of Godzilla, informed the Rob they would use none of his ideas, this was just a favor to Will
- After seeing the Matrix, the Rob knew they could not set the Mark in modern day, so they worked on having it take place in 1942 during World War II.
- When X-Men came out in 2000, the Mark could no longer take place during WWII either, even as far as James Lassiter accused the Rob of lifting the Mark from X-Men comics
- In 2004, Will and Lassiter pitched the Mark to Nickelodeon as an animated series that the Rob got paid for but never saw the light of day
- The Rob feels the Mark was his one good screenplay, will probably never get made at this point because it’s been around Hollywood since 1993
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