If you remember back to 2012 you'll recall that we reported that James Wan was in talks to direct a big-screen adaptation of the classic Richard Dean Anderson series MacGyver. Soon afterwards the Fast & Furious franchise came calling and James Wan had to give up his MacGyver plans to go make a little film by the name of FURIOUS 7.
James Wan recently spoke to CraveOnline where he was asked about his abandoned MacGyver project and why he had to give it up.
I love MacGyver. I do! What kind of sucked was, and not fully sucked, I had to give MacGyver up to pursue Furious 7, so that was what I had to give up.
Although it sounds like he never got very far into production, Wan still had plenty of ideas on where he would take the film:
I never got into [the production] too much but my initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right? He’s a really smart guy but he’s so smart he could never feel like he fit into a construct, or into a world that is an establishment. So he’s always a bit of an outsider. So he’s very crafty, he’s very smart, all kinds of science and mathematics and engineering.
To cut a long story short, the idea here is I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a North by Northwest. [So] in the context of the story he gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him. He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of Enemy of the State. So imagine Enemy of the State, if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's a project Wan will return to as he believes New Line has since lost the rights.
I don’t know, I [think] New Line, that I was going to do it with at the time, no longer has the rights to it. So yeah, I don’t know where it is at this point. Yeah, I love the concept behind MacGyver, and I love the direction that we were going with it.
While it'd be hard to imagine anyone other than Richard Dean Anderson taking on the role of MacGyver, I do hope James Wan (or someone) is able to return to this someday. It could make for a fun little action franchise. After FURIOUS 7 hits theaters on April 3, 2015, Wan will be returning to the world of horror with the THE CONJURING 2. The horror sequel is slated to arrive in theaters on June 10, 2016.
But would they bring the mullet back?