Ben Falcone is a prolific actor, writer and director who's made a name for himself collaborating with his wife, Melissa McCarthy on comedies like Tammy, Life of the Party and The Boss. Their latest film is Thunder Force, a hilarious superhero satire that Falcone wrote and directed while also playing a small but unforgettable role as a criminal who suffers a brutal (but hysterical) tasing at the hands of Octavia Spencer's budding invisible woman.
In an interview with CBR, Falcone talked about what inspired him to write Thunder Force, where the ideas for stars Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer's characters came from and how he hopes the film will impact future superhero stories.
CBR: What inspired you to write Thunder Force?
Ben Falcone: Well, I love comic books, as I'm going to make abundantly clear […]. I grew up with them, I love them and I've always wanted to make a superhero movie, especially once I saw, way back, I saw Batman and then when I saw the first Avengers I was like, "Oh wow, they can do anything. You can make anything happen. Holy tamales!" -- or whatever people say. So, I thought, well, I've wanted to work with Octavia [Spencer] and Melissa [McCarthy] together for so long, and I had an idea about the owner of the LA Times, because he was a pharmaceutical engineer, and I was like, "Oh, well, if you were that rich or if you were really Bruce Wayne, couldn't he do more than just make a bat suit and couldn't he make more than just a car?" As we go on in technology, and obviously taking away the ethical implications of when it fails -- because you'd need probably to fail before you succeed -- but couldn't somebody genetically engineer a superhero in a world where there weren't any?
So the idea of someone being brilliant, clearly that's Octavia because [..] she's just so smart, and she's so great -- she's been our friend forever. And then the idea of somebody being like a blue-collar, loyal friend who's kind of a scrapper, which I love. You know, that's kind of a comic-book trope right, whether it's the Thing, or you know.… There's millions of examples of somebody's like, "Ah, I used to get into scraps in the schoolyard and here I am and I help out my smart friend." So that sort of put together in my head and then kind of rolled from there. And [I] tried to punch holes in it, tried to compare it to comic books that I grew up reading just in terms of the simplicity of the story and then wrote the script from there.
There's an extent to which Thunder Force is a subversion of traditional superhero movies because it focuses on middle-aged women, which you don't typically see. Were you trying to communicate a message with that?
No. I don't know the demographics of comic books […] but maybe if more women of that age group were reading comics there'd be more comics about it. People tend to write what they know. But so I just worked from character first, and I was like, "Ooh, brilliant scientist: Octavia. Ooh, kick-ass friend: Melissa." And then I was like, "Ooh, fighting team. Great! They're Thunder Force." And then went from there, and this sort of world-building from there. But the gender to me was a side effect, just like Tammy isn't a movie about a woman, it's a movie about a person who happens to be a woman. Does that make any sense?
So, to me, that was sort of the tactic I took and let the actors take it from there. And if people take more away from it, meaning like, "Oh, I haven't seen this before," hopefully that means, well, why don't we see more of lots of different superheroes in lots of different ways because there's room for everybody at the table. It's clearly a good market and people enjoy the films and so many people love comic books, why not?
Written and directed by Ben Falcone, Thunder Force stars Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Bobby Cannavale, Pom Klementieff, Taylor Mosby, Melissa Leo and Jason Bateman. The film arrives on Netflix on Friday, April 9.