Shane Black Isn’t Done With Doc Savage — He Still Wants to Bring the Pulp Legend to the Big Screen

Shane Black still has Doc Savage on the brain. Yes, that Doc Savage project he circled ages ago. And yes, he knows exactly why it keeps stalling out.

Quick refresher: Black is the guy who wrote or co-wrote Lethal Weapon, The Monster Squad, Lethal Weapon 2, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, then moved into directing with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, Edge, The Nice Guys, The Predator, and the newly released Play Dirty. About sixteen years back, he was announced to write and direct a Doc Savage movie and even had Dwayne Johnson ready to don the khaki. It never made it to cameras.

What Black is saying now

In a new chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Black said he still wants to make Doc Savage. No hedging. The catch: money. He loves the character and the idea of keeping it as a 1930s period adventure, but that means scale, and scale means budget.

"It's going to be $150 million. Minimum."

"I wouldn't want to modernize it."

That tracks with how he describes the whole pitch. Doc Savage is not just one guy punching bad guys; it is an entire world of globe-trotting pulp spectacle. Which brings us to the inside baseball part: studios are happier spending that kind of cash on a Batman or Superman. Doc Savage? Not exactly a household name in 2025, even if he is baked into the DNA of superheroes.

Who is Doc Savage again?

Think of Clark Savage Jr. as the original pulp polymath: scientist, explorer, detective, warrior; the guy who rights wrongs and punishes evildoers. He first hit the stands in Doc Savage Magazine in 1933, five years before Clark Kent. Black points out that the character was literally pitched as a super man and sparked a wave of comics and pulps that followed.

If not The Rock, then who?

Dwayne Johnson was on board back when Black was first shepherding this. If Johnson has moved on from his superhero stretch, Black does not have a replacement in mind yet. And he is blunt about the requirement: you need a star compelling enough to pry open a $150 million-plus budget for a 1930s period piece. Without that, the math gets ugly fast.

This thing has been trying to happen forever

• 1960s: Hollywood starts poking at Doc Savage as a screen property.
• 1967: Chuck Connors is lined up to star in The Thousand-Headed Man, but rights issues kill it before filming.
• 1975: Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely, actually comes out. Plans for a sequel and/or a TV series get scrapped after the film lands poorly.
• Later: Arnold Schwarzenegger considers a version with director Chuck Russell and writer Frank Darabont; it does not go forward.
• Also later: Sam Raimi toys with a pulp-verse idea pairing Doc Savage with The Shadow and The Avenger; that stalls too.

The read

This is the classic pulp-adventure problem: the stuff that makes it cool (period setting, big swings, globe-spanning production design) is exactly what makes it expensive. And unless your lead character is a brand-name hero, studios get skittish. If Black can lock the right star and keep the period vibe intact, I am there day one. Would you want to see him finally take a swing at Doc Savage?