WTF Happened to The Spirit (2008)?

Frank Miller’s The Spirit is a Neo-noir superhero film based on the classic character created by Will Eisner. A live-action film version of the character had been planned for years, with William Friedkin coming close to making a movie back in the eighties. It almost got made as an animated film. In the wake of Robert Rodriguez’s successful version of Sin City, that film’s co-director/writer, the legendary Frank Miller, was able to get the rights. It would be done in a similar style to that film, with it shot in a largely desaturated, highly stylized form that was catching on at the time thanks to not only Sin City but also 300, which, not coincidently, was also based on Frank Miller’s work.

Frank Miller would adapt The Spirit himself, casting Gabriel Macht as Denny Colt, the ghost-like superhero. Macht was largely unknown (he would go on to find fame on the long-running series Suits) but was surrounded by an A-list cast, including Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johannson. The film would be met with derision from fans, with many taking issue with Jackson’s wildly over-the-top performance as the villain, The Octopus. It lost its financier tens of millions of dollars, and Miller’s only other credit as a director would come on the Sin City sequel, A Dame to Kill For, which reteamed him with Rodriguez. So what happened? Why was The Spirit such a box-office disaster, and does the Movie have any fans? We dig into Frank Miller’s The Spirit and its (un)making in this week’s WTF Happened to this Movie, written by Gaius Bolling, edited by Cesar Gabriel, and narrated by Dave Davis.