Kurt Sutter Talks About Canned ‘Punisher’ Sequel

The Punisher (2004) is one of my personal favourite comic book movies ever.  Probably my second favourite after the patently awesome Batman Returns.  The Punisher came out when these types of movies were new and fresh, following Blade and the first two X-Men movies.  Now, these kinds of movies are just bleh.  I don’t even have the energy to summon interest in the new Punisher TV series.

Anyway, Kurt Sutter was tasked with penning the sequel to Jane’s movie.  It was canned though in favour of ‘Warzone’.

This week he tells Looper that his deviation with the character pitch didn’t go well with Marvel executives at the time:

“I’m a Marvel fan, but I was not a comic book kid. I didn’t really get into that whole world until about 15 years ago, which is when I started getting into graphic novels. And that happened in Paris, because their graphic novel industry is decades beyond ours!

But I didn’t realize that you can’t take liberties with some of the characters and some of the traits, because they are what they are. They’re very derivative, they’re stereotyped, but this is the guy that does this, and this is the guy who does this… So they’re two-dimensional for a reason: that’s the purpose they serve.

So I was trying to expand the Marvel Universe in a direction it should not have been expanded in. I think I was trying to write to the emotionality of this dude and motivate the absurd violence with some kind of meaning. I don’t mean that I was, like, f-ing Gandhi [Laughs]. But I was just trying to root it a little bit more in the mental anguish that he went through to justify it, and to take a little bit of that journey.

So I think that’s what I was trying to do: humanize him a little bit more. But it’s the kind of thing where there’s only X amount of time [in] the movies, so you have moments of that, but you can’t really have a subplot that explores that kind of thing. Not in a summer blockbuster or Marvel picture.”

Of course, the film had an official short sequel, Dirty Laundry.  Check it out below if you’ve missed it.