Apparently the shitty returns on John Carter haven’t dissuaded all of Hollywood from trying out various riffs on Avatar using Edgar Rice Burroughs stories as source material. In this case, Burroughs’ Tarzan is the target and instead of being a partially mo-capped riff on Avatar like John Carter, it will be a fully mo-capped riff on Avatar. This comes from Constantin Film, which has been developing a this movie for some time.
Before we proceed, let me make it clear that yes, I know Avatar was ripping off a long-line of magical-white-people stories that in fact owe themselves to the work of Burroughs. I get it. But now Cameron’s flick is the thing that’s made billions, and pulling these literary sources is a way of trading on that success with some literary righteousness to back you up. It’s all the same “white dude embeds with natives and helps them save against invading hordes” shit, just switch out what kind of natives are going to be entirely CGI.
While the director, Reinhard Klooss, seems to be a frequent helmer of German family films (including what seems to be Germany’s own Madagascar rip-off), the cast includes two American up-and-comers. Kellan Lutz is a veteran of the Twilight films and Calvin Klein ads, and he’ll be donning the dots to play the mocap Tarzan, while Jane will be played by Spencer Locke (Resident Evil 3, Detention). I will 
say Locke is a pretty great actress who has a serious command of physical performance and big expresion, so I’m not in the least bit shocked she landed this gig.
There will be a few tweaks to the story for this version.
For example, Tarzan’s parents, billionaire adventurers, are now killed in airplane crash rather than being marooned with their child. And the movie’s villain is the CEO of Greystoke Energies, a man who took over the company from Tarzan’s deceased parents. In the script, Jane is the daughter of an African guide and is committed to the conservation and preservation of the African jungle. She eventually works with Tarzan to defeat the mercenary army of Greystoke Energies.
Thoughts? Any Tarzan purists out there?
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Source | THR
4 comments
Yeah, these days “Source” = “Last Successful Variant”.
I loved Ron Ely’s TV Tarzan as a kid but Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan pretty much covered my interest in this particular story on the big screen.
Wasn’t Avatar a ripoff of Pocahontas? Anyway, I don’t feel your need to lump any of these three films together. Mocap doesn’t equal Avatar to me, and Hollywood has been rehashing the incredibly vague storyline you described for about 100 years with varying degrees of success. I really enjoyed John Carter but I think Disney gave it the shaft. I wouldn’t call myself a purist by any means, but i consumed about everything ERB wrote when I was a kid, and that Tarzan synopsis sounds like it was written by a twelve year-old girl home schooled by radical leftists. I weep for the future.
Renn Brown, Tarzan hasn’t been well adapted since Filmations…Tarzan: Lord Of The Jungle! I prefer the…Johnny Weismuller Tarzan!
They lost me at “Greystoke Energies.”
I get the need to modernize, but must it be so generic and predictible already?
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