The two-time Oscar nominee will co-star in The Punisher, to the delight of Tampa's film commissioner.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 15, 2003
Two-time Academy Award nominee John Travolta, a frequent Tampa Bay area visitor because of his Church of Scientology membership, will co-star in The Punisher, the Marvel Comics superhero motion picture filming in Tampa this summer.
Production of The Punisher is expected to begin in July, continuing for nearly three months at various locations around downtown and Ybor City.
The Punisher is slated for a summer 2004 release.
Travolta's hiring "catapults this project to a new level," said Tampa film commissioner Edie Emerald. "Based on what I've read in the script, I think he's absolutely perfect."
Travolta, 49, will play Howard Saint, an upstanding community leader hiding a criminal past. When Saint's son is murdered, his violent, vengeful acts attract the attention of the Punisher (Thomas Jane), a.k.a. Frank Castle, a former Special Operations soldier and FBI agent turned vigilante after his own family was slain by mobsters.
It's another bad-guy role for Travolta, whose mercurial film career took flight with his Oscar-nominated turn in 1977's Saturday Night Fever. That film led to a couple of hits - Urban Cowboy and Grease - before flops like the Fever sequel, Staying Alive, plus Blow Out and Perfect.
By the end of the 1980s, Travolta's only hits were the Look Who's Talking movies in which talking babies stole the show.
Travolta regained industry respect, and his second Oscar nomination, when Quentin Tarantino cast him as a contract killer in 1994's Pulp Fiction. Since then, many of the actor's best reviews and box office results came from villainous - or at least shady - roles in films like Get Shorty, Swordfish, Face/Off and Broken Arrow. The glaring exception was his bad-guy role in Battlefield Earth, based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and widely regarded as one of the worst movies of all time.
Travolta often visits the Church of Scientology spiritual center in downtown Clearwater, and last year purchased a $2.5-million home in Marion County equipped with an airplane runway and hangar. The actor, a licensed pilot, owns a Boeing 707.
Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Jumanji) will make his directing debut with The Punisher, using a script co-authored with St. Pete Beach resident Michael France.
The Punisher's producers are Gale Anne Hurd (the Terminator trilogy, The Hulk) and Avi Arad, president and CEO of Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of the comic book empire. Artisan Entertainment will handle U.S. distribution of the film.
Hensleigh has retooled France's script, and E! Online has reported that Oscar-nominated screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) was hired to polish the screenplay. Final writing credits will be determined by the Writers Guild of America.
France went through a similar process with his script for The Hulk, another Marvel Comics superhero that comes to theaters June 20. After an arbitration hearing, the Writers Guild gave France shared screenplay credit.
Meanwhile, production offices for The Punisher were being built Wednesday one floor above Jackson's Bistro on Harbour Island in Tampa. Unit production manager John Starke will use nearly 15,000 square feet of office space.
Starke's announcement on Tuesday that The Punisher will be filming in Tampa ignited a flurry of activity among Internet users. Within hours, the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) had so many inquiries about The Punisher that it was noted as one of the site's most popular searches.
The comic book fan site Super Hero Hype (www.superherohype.com) published news of Travolta's hiring, Tampa's selection as primary locale, photographs of the movie's skull logo and Jane in his Punisher garb: black trench coat and pants, muscle shirt with the logo, and several weapons.
E! Online includes an interview with Marvel Studios executive vice president Kevin Feige, who said a "teaser" preview of The Punisher will be shown before The Hulk.
The Internet Movie Database estimated the film's budget at $30-million, well below the average production cost of a film in 2002. Feige told E! Online that the budget will be less than Spider-man, Daredevil or the X-Men movies because the Punisher uses ammunition rather than super powers to fight crime.
"He's not a traditional Marvel hero and doesn't have a costume, doesn't have a mask, doesn't require an immense amount of (computer-generated imaging) to pull off what he does," Feige said. "It's one of the best scripts we have, and it'll be made for a (lower than usual) price."
