Shane Black back to work on Doc Savage.

Fresh after directing potentially this years biggest movie Iron Man 3, Shane Black has announced he will be returning to his work on the long gestating movie adaptation of the classic pulp hero Doc Savage.

It was announced before he took the helm of Iron Man 3 that he would be directing and writing the adaptation, this was as far back as 2010.  

He recently told collider:

 “Well Doc Savage is proceeding on pace. I mean we’ve got to try to set a deal now to go back into that, so as Iron Man wound down I sort of reconnected with Sony who have been gracious to say, ‘We’ll wait a year and sit on these rights until you’re finished with this other picture that we don’t control.’ So they were really cool about it, they were really nice. So yeah I’m back on it.”

After the success that Iron Man 3 is sure to bring in it is safe to assume this will get the go ahead. But whether it is any good remains to be seen after all look what Jon Favreau did with Cowboys and Aliens following on from his time in the Iron Man directors chair. There is also the question of whether this will be his next project as it has been pretty widely reported he is making another adaptation in the manga title from Viz, Death Note which he told Bleeding Cool “Right now I’ve got this thing at Warner Bros. called Death Note that I like a lot. It’s a Japanese Manga that’s very tense and really cool.”

Doc Savage is of course one of the truly seminal characters of that age influencing many other characters afterwards from Bane to Tom Strong. He was also recently featured very prominently in the First Wave series from DC alongside The Spirit and Batman however DC lost the comic book rights to print Doc Savage in December.