How Old Is Too Old? Inside the Battle to Remake the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’

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https://www.thewrap.com/six-million-...hts-explained/

Mark Wahlberg, his agent Ari Emanuel and complicated rights issues have stalled a planned revival of the 1970s bionic man TV phenomenon.

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"It was 50 years ago that the “The Six Million Dollar Man,” a TV series about a former astronaut rebuilt with bionic limbs that give him superhuman strength, debuted on ABC.

The series starring Lee Majors became a cultural phenomenon, running for nearly 100 episodes from 1974 to 1978 and inspiring six follow-up television movies, “The Bionic Woman” spinoff and a cottage industry for licensed merchandise that included everything from action figures with an exploding briefcase to board games and comic books.

And yet since the late 1990s, when a movie version of “The Six Million Dollar” man was first plotted, no producer or studio has successfully remade the show — partly because of competing interests over movie rights.

For a decade the project has been locked in with Mark Wahlberg, now aged 52, who seems determined to hold on to his dream to star in a remake. (Majors was in his early 30s when the show was a hit.)

Thus far Wahlberg doesn’t have any takers. His agent Ari Emanuel owns the domestic movie option, which expires in 2025, according to insiders. Fans of the franchise say that’s a shame.

“In a world of diminishing IP, the $6 Million or the $6 Billion Man is reflective of the properties that are still out there and available,” a producer previously associated with the project wrote TheWrap.

“This one has potential because the IDEA is so strong,” the producer added. “The opening of the show said ‘We have the technology’ and boy do we now. If a visionary uses it to reflect society as it is today, the concept can thrive and be amazing. That’s not gonna happen with a 52 year old actor now known for Netflix rom coms and hamburgers.”

To Mike Avila, a TV producer and the author of “The Art and Making of Aquaman,” the five-decade struggle to exploit “The Six Million Dollar Man” into a modern-day movie “is a colossal failure by Hollywood to mine one of the most important pop culture properties of the last half-century,” he wrote in an email to TheWrap.

“It’s mind boggling that here we are in 2024 and we still haven’t seen a ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ (or Six Billion Dollar Man) movie adaptation,” Avila said. “I’m not sure there’s ever been as big a TV series that has been mired in development hell like this.”

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hollywood was cashing in on 1970s nostalgia, spitting out movie versions of “The Brady Bunch,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “The Mod Squad” and “Charlie’s Angels,” which starred Majors’ second wife Farrah Fawcett in the original Aaron Spelling TV series. “I’d argue that the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ had the largest pop culture impact of any of those properties,” Avila said, “and yet it got lost in the mix.”

The failure to rocket the show into the future came down to “bad timing and bad ideas,” Avila added. But it serves as a cautionary tale for Hollywood producers looking to adapt legacy TV properties."

"From ‘Cyborg’ to ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’

“The Six Million Dollar Man” was loosely adapted from the novel “Cyborg” by American writer Martin Caidin and developed for television by legendary producer Glen Larson. Caidin’s novel created the Steve Austin character, an astronaut and test pilot who has a near-fatal rocket crash and then is saved through a secret government program that replaces parts of his shattered body with bionic limbs and a bionic eye.

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology…to make the world’s first bionic man,” a government agent says in the show’s opening voice over. “Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.”

The original television pilot movie in March of 1973 was the tenth most-watched program that week, according to Nielsen. Two more TV movies followed. They were darker in tone than the series that debuted in 1974. Larson’s show was campier, featuring villainous characters like the Wookie-like “Bigfoot” and slow-developing action scenes shot in slow-motion punctuated by cheesy sound effects. But the show worked, for the time, and “Six Million” ran for five seasons.

Caidin died in 1997, but his estate has continued to control the underlying rights to “The Six Million Dollar Man.”

The effort to make a movie started in 1995, when “Clerks” director Kevin Smith penned a “Six Million Dollar Man” screenplay for Universal Pictures. Smith later turned his script into a comic book in 2011 under the title, “The Bionic Man.” A press release at the time said it was licensed by NBC Universal Television Consumer Products Group.

Six years later, Michael Zoumas, a former senior VP of production and development at Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films, tried to take the project further. Zoumas made a deal with Jeff Mackler, the lawyer for the Caidin estate, along with Weinstein and two other executives.

After the ink dried, the Weinstein team realized that the estate only claimed domestic, not global, movie adaptation rights, which were tied in with the original show’s place within the vast Universal Television empire. (Lawyers associated with the rights would not disclose the price tag on the deal.)

Now, Dimension had to cut in Universal Pictures, who controls the international rights to “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Universal granted approval moving forward. (Universal declined to comment for this article.)

Even with the Dimension agreement in place, “The Six Million Dollar Man” failed to advance. Big stars like Will Smith and Jim Carrey, and filmmakers like Bryan Singer and Todd Phillips, approached the project before ultimately deciding to move on.

All the waffling was costing Bob Weinstein. At one point, fearing he would lose the rights, the executive paid more than $750,000 to purchase the domestic rights outright from the Caidin family. The decision proved disastrous. After seven years without a movie, the rights reverted to the family, according to insiders with knowledge of the situation. That led Weinstein to renew the option on a yearly basis, with fees reaching $250,000 for these short-term extensions."

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