Why Sacha Baron Cohen's Mandrake the Magician Movie is a Tricky Ask For Hollywood

Nothing goes out of style faster in Hollywood than comedy. Adam Sandler, once the toast of the studios, was struggling to attract an audience before Netflix stepped in with a deal to take his films streaming only. Mike Myers hasn’t led a live action movie since his ill-fated, Razzie-winning turn in 2008′s hideously unfunny ‘The Guru’, ending a run of popular hits stretching through the Austin Powers movies all the way back to 1992′s ‘Wayne’s World’. Now Sacha Baron Cohen, once the toast of Hollywood, finds himself in a similar position after spy caper ‘Grimsby’ tanked at the box office, leaving his peculiar brand of brutal, shock tactics gonzo comedy with no obvious path forward.

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A less ambitious man might have taken this as a sign that he was meant to take a back seat. After all Baron Cohen has proven in recent years, in films such as Martin Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’, that he has the delicacy of touch to bring his larger-than-life creations to more cerebral work as a character actor for hire. Instead, the 44-year-old star of ‘Borat’, ‘Bruno’ and ‘The Dictator’ is tipped to become the latest big name to headline his own comic book movie, this time as pulp hero Mandrake the Magician. The perfect move, one might think, in an era when Hollywood stars of the calibre of Robert Downey Jr and Jennifer Lawrence are doing the very same thing.

The problem here is that ‘Mandrake the Magician’ is not your average comic book movie. Lee Falk’s fanciful sorcerer hails from a curious 1930s pre-superhero era that was heavily inspired by the weird and wonderful fantasy serials and pulp novels of the era. The strip’s flamboyantly outlandish tales of globe-trotting adventures in the company of exotic companions such as Lothar the African manservant and Princess Narda of (the fictional European nation of) Cockaigne are very different from those featuring the later Batman and Superman, let alone relatively modern, audience-friendly 1960s superheroes such as Spider-Man. And Hollywood has struggled with material from this era in the past.

Falk’s other famous creation is ‘The Phantom’, which you might remember from a terrible 1996 comic book movie starring Billy Zane (above) as the costumed crime fighter. Two years prior, Alec Baldwin made his first and last appearance as a superhero in ‘The Shadow’, an infamous box office bomb based on the crimefighting pulp hero introduced in 1931. Then there was Frank Miller’s ‘The Spirit’, another infamous turkey (this time from as recently as 2008) about the early DC Comics master detective.

To this unfortunate list we can also add films such as Disney’s ‘John Carter’ (pictured below), based on the even earlier Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels about an adventurer magically transported to Mars, and the studio’s 2013, Johnny Depp-led misfire ‘The Lone Ranger’, based on the 1930s radio serial. Both bombed with critics and failed spectacularly at the box office.

You might think Hollywood would have learned its lesson here, that fantasy stories from this era are either too hokey or too fanciful to be consumed by modern audiences. Studio Warner Bros, which will back ‘Mandrake the Magician’, is currently struggling to convince critics that it is worth turning out to see Superman do his thing at the cinema: how do they expect filmgoers to invest time in a hero whose magic powers of invisibility, shapeshifting and levitation all stem from a magician’s kit (hat, cloak and wand) he inherited from his dear old dad?

The alternative view here, of course, is to look at the success of the early ‘Indiana Jones’ movies and even ‘Star Wars’, both of which borrow liberally from the golden age of pulp fantasy. And Baron Cohen’s presence suggests that writer-director Etan Cohen will deliver a movie with tongue firmly in cheek. Disney-owned Marvel has found huge success by buying into the inherent silliness of superheroes, embracing the meta and using it to sidestep cynicism. Perhaps ‘Mandrake the Magician’ can do the same.

Intriguingly, the studio’s upcoming effort ‘Doctor Strange’ will cover some similar territory. Even here, despite the comic book hailing from the 1960s, Marvel has run into considerable controversy in its efforts to rise above the source material’s inherently racist characterisations. Will Warner excise Mandrake the Magician’s “giant black slave” manservant Lothar for similar reasons?

One thing’s for sure. If studio really can transform Baron Cohen into the next Downey Jr, it will have bucked a Hollywood trend going back decades, in the process pulling off a seriously impressive magic trick of its very own.

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Image credits: Rex Features/Lee Falk/Paramount Pictures/Disney Marvel