Author Donald Westlake had always made a point of never allowing adaptations of his work to use the name of his famed literary creation, but clearly all bets were off once he died and Jason Statham’s Parker entered active development before hitting the screen in 2013.
Having already appeared in the cult classic Point Blank where Lee Marvin played erstwhile pseudonym Walker, before Mel Gibson’s troubled thriller Payback did much the same by dubbing the protagonist as Porter, the character’s third feature-length outing finally saw Parker credited under his true lineage.
In the end, it didn’t really matter in the slightest when Taylor Hackford’s derivative action thriller scored lukewarm reviews from critics and underperformed at the box office after hauling in just $46 million against a $35 million budget, but no matter what happens on screens both big and small, there’s barely an IP on the planet that isn’t safe from being rebooted and reinvented eventually.
To that end, another attempt at monetizing the Parker novels is in the works, although this one does at least have no shortage of potential after Lethal Weapon creator and crime caper extraordinaire Shane Black was announced to be re-teaming with his Iron Man 3 star Robert Downey Jr. to launch an entire franchise. Things have been quiet for well over a year on that front, but Statham’s stab has at least been making a comeback on streaming.
Per FlixPatrol, the formulaic story of a thief with a code of honor running foul of his former employers and being left for dead has unraveled a conspiracy on the Starz worldwide watch-list, which makes sense considering the chrome-domed veteran’s extensive back catalogue of diverting enough genre films are always hovering in and around the on-demand rankings.