With the box office success of Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker, the sky is the absolute limit for what Warner Bros. can accomplish with the Caped Crusader’s rogues gallery ladies and gentlemen! I’m here to give you my fan-cast on a villain that will give Joker a run for its money, Solomon Grundy.
Who Is Solomon Grundy?
Born on a Monday… Solomon Grundy has the potential to be a beautifully-eerie love letter to the black-and-white monster and crime thriller movies. The story of Cyrus Gold; who eventually becomes the resurrecting grey behemoth that is Solomon Grundy is such a tragic story in so many ways. As a young child Gold came from a low-income single-parent household. His mother abandoned the family after years of abuse from her husband. This in return left his father to work in harsh unregulated conditions at the Gotham docks. His father was physically abused and emotionally humiliated regularly by his boss. This leads to drunken behavior after work at home, abusing his son and burying him every year on his birthday in a makeshift grave. In a cruel effort to teach his son that he’s less than dirt.
If you think that’s bad, it gets worst. Cyrus witnesses his father’s death at work when a crate snaps off a wire onto his head. Then his father’s boss proceeds to nudge the deceased body off the pier into the water. Cyrus would live on the streets, mugged and assaulted by gangs until he eventually took up a life of crime that leads him down a path to becoming the infamous gangster. From robbery, burglary, assaults, extortion, and murder – which includes murders of his father’s boss, people that violated him in the past, his wife, and his mother for abandoning him.
Soon karma would catch up to Mr. Gold. When he was backstabbed by his partners in crime for greed. Murdered, his body thrown into the mysterious Slaughter Swamp, only to be resurrected 50 years later as the monster, Solomon Grundy.
Ideas
Solomon Grundy can be comical, horrific, or dramatic. This is widely due to the fact of his constant resurrections. With each Grundy being born again different than the one before, but with this take I am going for the tragic monster direction. In the comics, Gold is reborn from the swamp not knowing a thing about himself (or his former life in general). Besides that, he was born on a Monday and he’s given the name Solomon Grundy from some homeless fellow because that one statement he makes reminds the stranger of the poem about a fictional figure called “Solomon Grundy”:
“Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy.”
In this case, I would get rid of that part of the storyline. Instead, he dons the name from a real man. Say that Gotham City has a local legend about a real man by the name of Grundy who was buried in Slaughter Swamp during the 1800s. Giving birth to the origin of the nursery rhyme and locals see Cyrus Gold come up from the swamp believing it is the ghost of Solomon Grundy. The first half of the movie would take place in the 1920s or1930s Gotham City. During the Prohibition in the United States of America. The remainder of the movie would take place in the 1950s instead of 50 years later. I’d like to see Cyrus Gold portrayed similarly as a mix of William Tallman from The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Have the entire movie shot black-and-white and I know the perfect director who can handle the job but I’ll get to that soon! I would keep everything between his family, but we need a protagonist in this movie. Guess what! It can’t be Batman, shocker. So I’m going with a new character made up on the spot called Lawrence J. Cooper. Cooper is a seasoned special agent for the FBI that served under the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) in World War II. He’ll be on the hunt. tracking the mysterious gruesome mass murders around the proximity of Slaughter Swamp.
Cast & Crew
Cyrus Gold/Solomon Grundy – George MacKay (1917)
In the movie when he becomes Grundy, the studio can always use a body double or invest in amazing makeup artists and costume designers.
Cyrus’ Father – Ben Mendelsohn (The King)
Cyrus Mother – Kate Dickie (The Witch)
Special agent Cooper – Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse)
Director and screenplay – Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse)
I truly believe this would be a hit while shaking up the current DCEU even more! We need this kind of genre to make a comeback on the mainstream level. Robert Eggers has yet to disappoint and seeing him tackle a larger budget film would be exciting. As long as the studio gives him room to be creative as they did for Todd Phillips then I am confident such a film would be a success.
While I could go more in-depth this is only a brief rundown but don’t you worry there’s more to come in the future. Stay tuned.
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