Broken Frontier

Columbia Pictures has acquired the rights to adapt the popular 1930s pulp hero The Shadow to the silver screen. Spider-Man franchise director Sam Raimi is on board to bring him to life.

The Shadow debuted in the spring of 1931 as the star of Street and Smith’s first pulp magazine publication. The character was created by newspaper veteran Walter B. Gibson, who used the pen name of Maxwell Grant when writing 282 of the 325 Shadow novels.

Looking for a way to boost sales of their pulp magazine and overall popularity of the character, Street and Smith turned to CBS for the production of a radio show starring The Shadow. It was on this legendary show, featuring the up-and-coming Orson Welles, that the catchphrase "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" became entrenched in pop culture.

Prior to Columbia’s efforts to reintroduce The Shadow for the modern age, the pulp hero had already starred in six two-reel movies and seven feature films, the latest of which was Universal’s The Shadow starring Alec Baldwin in 1994. The movie hardly became a success, but Columbia has high hopes that things will be different with Raimi at the helm.

For Raimi, working on The Shadow has always been a dream project, whose influence was clear in the director’s 1990 feature Darkman. With Raimi now attached to The Shadow, it appears the Spider-Man franchise is left in the dark after the third film opens May 4, 2007.

Siavash Farahani will be working on the screenplay while Raimi, along with his Buckaroo Entertainment partner Josh Donen and Comic Book Movies’ Michael Uslan are set to produce.

For the original Hollywood Reporter article, click here .

- Frederik Hautain