Fire up your proton packs, ladies…uh, we mean rocket packs! Following in the footsteps of the all-female “Ghostbusters,” another hero is being re-imagined as a woman. A sequel-reboot of Disney’s “The Rocketeer” is in the works at the studio with the story starring a black woman, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The original 1991 film was based on a much-loved comic based in the 1930s and starred Billy Campbell as Cliff Secord, “a stunt pilot who discovers a rocket pack and suit to die for and become embroiled with mobsters and Nazis, as well as Howard Hughes and the FBI.” Jennifer Connelly played his Golden Age of Hollywood actress girlfriend and Timothy Dalton was an Errol Flynn-lookalike who turned out to be spying for the Nazis.
As The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Set six years after the original ‘Rocketeer’ and after Secord has vanished while fighting the Nazis, an unlikely new hero emerges: a young African–American female pilot, who takes up the mantle of Rocketeer in an attempt to stop an ambitious and corrupt rocket scientist from stealing jetpack technology in what could prove to be a turning point in the Cold War.” The new film has a working title of “The Rocketeers.”
The original movie was a box office failure but developed a cult following during the VHS boom of the ‘90s. As THR writes, “the movie took on a life of its own, engendering a massive following who loved its un-ironic, bright, and straightforwardly heroic take on characters, all abetted by a score by James Horner. When Disney hosted a 20th anniversary screening of the movie in Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre in 2011, fans, many in Rocketeer costume, lined up for blocks. It was around that time that the studio began mulling a reboot of the movie but sources said it sought a way to differentiate it from another rocket-propelled flying hero, Iron Man.”
Funnily enough, it was also recently announced that the next Iron Man would, in fact, be an African-American woman.
We can’t wait to hear more about this female-led “Rocketeer” reboot as more info comes in, and hope that Disney hires a woman to direct the project.
