Nic Cage and Cameron Diaz Eying 'Green Hornet' Roles

One's a villain, the other is a love interest, guess which is which

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Monday, July 20th 2009 at 9:04 PM

Recently Seth Rogen told Ain't It Cool News the sets for Columbia's The Green Hornet were being built and "more people [are] working on the film every day." This was in response to rumors the film had been canned following word Stephen Chow was no longer directing and had ultimately dropped out of playing Kato. Today Variety adds even more to the conversation.

Word has it Nicolas Cage is in early talks to play the gangster villain in the feature with Cameron Diaz negotiating to play a reporter and love interest in the Michel Gondry-directed pic that stars Rogen as the masked crime fighter, based on the late-30s adventures which followed the adventures of Britt Reid, a bored playboy whose life is changed when he inherits his father's crusading newspaper, The Daily Sentinel. He saves the life of Kato, a Japanese man with incredible technical and martial-arts skills, who becomes Britt's closest ally — and transforms Britt's car into the supercharged Black Beauty, which gives them an edge as they search for evidence to expose the city's underworld in the newspaper.

The film is already set for a July 9, 2010 release with Gondry directing from a script penned by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the duo responsible for Superbad and part of the writing team on Pineapple Express.

Personally, I have no interest in this film and today's casting news doesn't help matters, and I also wonder just how large the audience is for this film. I have been working out in my head an editorial looking at films like this and the proposed Machete movie Robert Rodriguez is putting together based on the faux trailer from Grindhouse and trying to figure out why Green Hornet wouldn't end up being just another Land of the Lost and why Machete would do any better than Grindhouse. I actually am interested in the Machete movie, but I would say my interest is one that carries over to an overwhelmingly large group of moviegoers, which is what has me confused. Of course, I guess I shouldn't complain since I would rather see filmmakers making films outside the norm rather than just another brainless waste.

Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder as the online interest, in The Green Hornet specifically, seems to be mild (and that's being kind), but is there actual interest in the non-Internet obsessed moviegoers? I just don't know. Maybe someone out there can enlighten me.