Clint Eastwood Didn't Want to Star in a Namor Movie

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, find out whether Clint Eastwood wanted to star in a Namor movie

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and seventy-sixth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Clint Eastwood wanted to make a Namor movie

STATUS:

False Enough for a False

While I'm done with official Namor-themed legend installments, I still had a couple of Namor legends left over, so I'll use them for this installment AND the next one!

NAMOR USED TO BE A VERY POPULAR COMIC BOOK CHARACTER

There are a couple of things that people tend to forget when it comes to both Clint Eastwood and Namor. The first is that Namor was once REALLY popular. The comic book company that is now Marvel (typically referred to as Timely Comics, but honestly, Martin Goodman's whole deal as a publisher was that he would use different company names as presumably some sort of tax dodge, so Timely Comics was not an official name for Marvel back in the Golden Age, but it's close enough for our purposes) only had one true breakout character in the 1940s, which was Captain America, who quickly was selling on par with the BIG characters like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel, but the industry was booming so much that heroes like Human Torch and Sub-Mariner were still VERY popular.

It's sometimes hard to conceptualize that when Namor has become such a relatively minor character in the years since. He hasn't been an A-List character since the Golden Age, really. Even when his comic book had a longer comeback in the 1950s than Captain America and Human Torch's similar revivals, it was simply because Marvel believed that there might be a TV adaptation of Namor in the works, so the company kept his comic going for a while longer until it was clear that it wasn't happening and then it, too, was canceled.

Therefore, there is a whole generation of people who remember Sub-Mariner as a MAJOR part of their childhood. For instance, the great Roy Thomas (who recently celebrated his 82nd birthday) grew up as a big Sub-Mariner fan. However, it wasn't just little kids who were reading these comics. They were also popular with a wide variety of people, as comics were truly BOOMING in the 1940s.

That brings me to the second point, which is that I think people sometimes forget just HOW old Clint Eastwood is, since he continues to make movies so frequently. The dude is NINETY-TWO YEARS OLD. Therefore, that means that he was nine years old when Namor made his first appearance in Marvel Comics #1. As a result, it was very realistic for Clint Eastwood to be quite familiar with Namor the Sub-Mariner in a way that would be quite ordinary, really.

That, of course, brings us to the legend at hand.

DID CLINT EASTWOOD EVER WANT TO MAKE A NAMOR MOVIE?

The always informative Geoff Boucher interviewed Eastwood back in 2010 for the LA Times, and the conversation was mostly about how Eastwood was approached about two iconic film roles, both taking over as James Bond and as the role of Superman in the Richard Donner Superman movie. Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the father and son producers of the original Superman movie, famously tried to get some big stars involved in the project, throwing around money left and right to lock in Marlon Brando as Superman's father, Jor-El, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and even hiring Mario Puzo to write the screenplay. However, they ultimately decided to go with a relatively unknown actor, Christopher Reeve, as Superman, but that was after considering a number of major stars, including, apparently, Eastwood.

Eastwood recalled, “I can remember – and this was many years ago – when [Warner Bros. President] Frank Wells came to me about doing Superman. So it could have happened. This was when they first started to think about making it. I was like, ‘Superman? Nah, nah, that’s not for me.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s for somebody, but not me."

Now, as the article notes, by the time the Superman movie actually came to fruition, Eastwood was in his late 40s and unlikely to be cast no matter what (again, he's a lot older than he seems), but when asked if he WOULD have been interested in the role at any point, the actor/director explained, “I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality. Maybe they do super things or more-than-human things — like Dirty Harry, he has a knack for doing crazy things, or the western guys — but, still, they’re not caped crusaders.”

When Boucher suggested that Eastwood would have been better suited to be a movie Batman, Eastwood replied, "“Hey buddy, the Sub-Mariner, that’s the one I always liked. I had all of those comics when I was a kid.”

And...that's it. Don't get me wrong, it's a good piece of information to know that Clint Eastwood was a fan of Namor the Sub-Mariner, so it's a good job by Boucher, but, like, THAT'S IT. It is merely Eastwood saying the superhero he liked as a kid was Sub-Mariner. Not, "I would have liked to have starred in a Namor movie" or anything like that. Just that the superhero he liked as a kid was Sub-Mariner.

And yet, over the last decade, this story has grown, telephone style into "Clint Eastwood wanted to make a Namor movie." Nope, never happened.

Thanks to Geoff Boucher and Clint Eastwood for the information.