i want you to hit me as hard as you can... When Sean Connery died in October 2020 he left behind
an incredible legacy of films and characters from James Bond to his Oscar-winning performance in The
Untouchables. Yet you could be forgiven if the name Alan Quatermain doesn't rank quite as high
in your memory even though it's Connery's last feature role in the ill-fated comic adaptation
the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. So how did the legendary actor's final film turn out
to be such a misfire? Climb on board the Nautilus as we find out what the [ __ ] happened to this
movie! Acclaimed comic writer Alan Moore, the man behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta and Batman
The Killing Joke, wanted to create a series that would gather popular literary figures in a Justice
League style collaboration. Partly inspired by the 1960 film The League of Gentlemen about
former soldiers who team up for a bank robbery, Moore would join artist Kevin O'Neill to create
the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The comic was released to critical and commercial success
with the first of six volumes published in 1999. Set at the end of the 19th century the
story involves Dracula survivor Mina Harker, who joins MI5 agent Campion Bond, granddaddy of James,
in recruiting a secret task force of unique individuals to protect the British empire. The
team would include familiar and conveniently public domain figures like Alan Quatermain,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man.
As comic book movies were again proving to be reliable box office bets after the infamous
Batman and Robin, 20th Century Fox jumped at the prospect of a Victorian era X-Men,
beginning development on the project a year before the comic was even finished or published.
James Robinson, himself an experienced comic writer, would adapt the inventive high concept
property for a big budget feature. Naturally, transforming the comic to screen format would
not be straightforward but we'll come back to that. Thanks for watching Joblo videos,
if you enjoy our shows please like and subscribe and click the bell to be notified when new videos
go live. Now back to the show! Impressed with his work on Blade, the producers hired Stephen
Norrington to direct the film. With its blend of kinetic action and vampire horror, Blade had been
something of a cultural milestone resuscitating the comic movie genre with its success in 1998.
Norrington was skilled with visual effects but there were rumblings that the British director
could be challenging to work with. When it came time to cast the project the first and
only choice for Alan Quatermain, the big game hunter from the 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines,
was Sir Sean Connery. The former 007 was still a dependable draw thanks to hits like The Rock
and Fox's own thriller Entrapment. Previously the actor had famously turned down the roles of
Dumbledore in Harry Potter, the architect in the Matrix sequel and most notably the role of Gandalf
in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which reportedly would have earned him a few hundred million
in back-end profits. Connery had passed on those parts because he did not understand the scripts
and he felt the same about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but he did not want to make the same
mistake again so he agreed to the role. After Connery's $17 million dollar paycheck there
wasn't exactly a ton of money left for additional A-list stars. Monica Bellucci was initially cast
as vampire scientist Mina Harker but she dropped out shortly before production started due to
exhaustion from shooting the Matrix Reloaded and Tears of the Sun back to back. She was quickly
replaced with Peta Wilson, best known for starring in the first TV adaptation of La Femme Nikita.
Filling out the ranks would be British actors Tony Curran and Jason Flemyng as the movie's
invisible man and Dr Jekyll and, thanks to some preposterous prosthetics, his oversized alter ego.
Award-winning Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah was cast as Jules Verne's submarine captain Nemo,
with TV heartthrob Shane West joining as a grown-up Tom Sawyer. Stuart Townsend,
who also missed out on Lord of the Rings when it was determined he was too young for Aragorn,
would play Oscar Wilde's ageless aristocrat Dorian Gray.
Those last two characters are among the many deviations from the source material - neither
Sawyer nor Gray appears in the pages of Moore's and O'Neill's comic, with Gray added to the
movie as Mina's more age-appropriate romantic alternative to Connery's elder adventurer.
Tom Sawyer's inclusion was the studio's insistence to have an American with youth appeal, which one
producer called "the result of a stupid studio note that turned out to be brilliant." References
to his friend Huck Finn were originally part of the story but were removed from the final film.
Other changes from the comic would also be necessary for mainstream PG-13 appeal - Alan
Moore's Quatermain was a timid opium addict while the capable Mina led the team.
Mr Hyde was known for tearing men apart and the Invisible Man was an unstable murderer.
Speaking of which, screen rights to the original H.G. Wells Invisible Man were owned by Universal,
requiring the filmmakers to create an invisible man different enough from the Invisible Man
to avoid legal action. The villain was also justifiably switched from the comics thinly
veiled Fu Manchu, although a version of Sherlock Holmes nemesis Moriarty remained for the movie.
Early screenplay drafts had the league trying to stop a flesh-eating gas from being unleashed
in New York, but the studio flinched after 9/11, instead moving the setting to Venice and centering
on a madman who knocks down buildings, which they somehow thought was better? Sets for Venice and
Nemo's Nautilus were constructed in Prague, but mother nature had other plans when the city
experienced historical rain and flooding, all but destroying the submarine sets (ironically enough).
The water had risen so high in the city that the line producer had to survey the
damage from an inflatable boat. The cast and crew fled the country, altering the shooting
schedule and heading to other surviving sets in Malta while the Prague sets were rebuilt.
The devastation and delays added millions to the production budget. With that catastrophe
Norrington expected the studio to be flexible with the production schedule, but Fox refused to budge
from its July 2003 release date. This only added to the pressure and agitation of the director,
which leads us to one of the movie's greatest difficulties, according to various reports:
Stephen Norrington himself. The director seemed to despise nearly everything about big-budget
filmmaking, from managing large crews to strict timelines to studio supervision to firm financial
figures. He refused to engage with visiting journalists. One producer characterized him as
"immensely talented but not necessarily a people person." That was most apparent in his volatile
relationship with Sean Connery, who later said Norrington "unfortunately wasn't certified
before he started because he would have been arrested for insanity." The director and star
disagreed on nearly everything and Norrington's spontaneous creative whims did not help matters.
Connery was continuously aggravated with always waiting around to shoot,
something he had never experienced on a professional film set. Considering his status
he was not accustomed to the lack of respect or consideration. I'm waiting to be impressed.
Connery's own veteran movie experience had often manifested in the form of creative control,
including his refusal to play Quatermain as a former addict. As one producer said, "the guy
has never written or directed anything but you would think that he's a writer and director."
Norrington and Connery engaged in constant shouting matches in front of the cast and crew.
The director reportedly even shut down the entire set one day when he was dissatisfied
with an elephant gun prop, culminating in Connery threatening to have him fired and Norrington
taunting the actor to punch him. Connery apparently resisted the temptation and walked
off set. Or it's my boot up yer arse. Norrington's experimental style was taking a toll - he was
doing up to 10 setups as opposed to a typical two or three. One insider said, "this director
doesn't know what he wants, most of this movie is going to end up on the cutting room floor."
As production ran weeks over schedule everyone involved was exhausted and just wanted to go home.
As Connery himself said in an interview at the time, "I just want to complete this picture,
that's all I want right now." The actor, who also received an executive producer credit,
would see that through - Norrington effectively abandoned the movie during the editing process
after supervising less than half the material and Connery became heavily involved with
Blade editor Paul Rubell to salvage the movie. Although comparing the Daywalker's
effective fight scenes against the chaotic action in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
it's difficult to believe the same director and editor were involved in both.
It wasn't just Connery who had issues with the production - actor Richard Roxburgh,
who plays M (and more) later said he took the film solely for the chance to work with Connery
and Norrington but he knew on the very first day that the film was not going to be extraordinary.
Roxburgh described the finished movie as "an unadulterated stinker." Additionally,
the weather had not been the only calamity to strike the crucial Venice portion of the film.
When a complex and expensive sequence with a scale model of the city was deemed unacceptable
during post-production, there was a mad scramble to find an available effects house to redo the
work before the studio's hard summer release date. While the film's official budget is listed at $78
million dollars, various sources place the final figure closer to the $100 million dollar mark.
Despite internal pressure to push the troubled movie into the fall, and some resistance to the
marketing simplification to LXG instead of the proper full title, the film did end up hitting its
July 11, 2003 release date in North America, where it had to compete with Pirates of the Caribbean,
Terminator 3 and, coincidentally, Finding Nemo. The anachronistic action movie opened
in second place behind Captain Jack Sparrow's first adventure and it finished with only $66
million dollars domestic. Worldwide it managed to ultimately collect nearly $180 million and it was
surprisingly successful on home video release, perhaps out of audience's morbid curiosity.
Critics were ruthless in their dislike of the film, calling it appallingly stupid and
incompetently made. Many viewers took issue with the fact that the source material was original and
daring while the adaptation devolved into a forgettable brain dead summer action movie.
Screenwriter James Robinson admitted this dumbing down of the famous literary characters
was by design, saying "unfortunately the reading level of the world has declined."
And then came the lawsuit. Shortly after the movie's release, screenwriters Martin Poll and
Larry Cohen sued 20th Century Fox alleging they had plagiarized their 1993 script called Cast
of Characters, which featured similar situations and most of the same literary figures. The studio
settled out of court, which infuriated original author Alan Moore, as he felt the lawsuit had no
merit and the settlement would mean he was never given the opportunity to set the record straight.
That outcome and his general displeasure with the finished film led Moore to distance himself
from all future adaptations of his work, having become disillusioned by the Hollywood machine.
The movie would also notoriously result in career casualties. Once filming had wrapped,
Stephen Norrington notified his agent and the producers of various projects in development that
he would no longer work in Hollywood. Although his name has been attached to several prominent titles
over the years, including Ghost Rider and The Crow reboot, so far he has stayed true to his word.
And while the big summer tentpole release didn't exactly propel most of its cast to
the A-list, it essentially brought Sean Connery's remarkable career to a close.
Connery said that he simply fell out of love with the movie-making process, becoming fed up with as
he put it "dealing with idiots." He later turned down a cameo in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull, which would have been a more appropriate swan song, saying "retirement is just
too much damn fun." And while he did lend his voice to the From Russia with Love video game
and the Scottish animated film Sir Billi, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would sadly be the
last live-action film on Connery's impressive resume as he passed away on Halloween 2020.
Even through all that drama and adversity the story of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
still may not be finished - a reboot of the property has been discussed numerous times
over the years, so it's conceivable that we might someday see a version that lives up to the name.
Let us know your thoughts, leave a comment in the comments and thanks for watching