Currently on the big screen as the voice of Rocket in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Bradley Cooper has lined up a new potential franchise in Mack Bolan. Cooper is set to headline a feature film based on the Don Pendleton character and, according to a story today at Deadline, he’s going to be re-teaming with his The Hangover trilogy director Todd Phillips to do it.
Bolan, nicknamed “The Executioner,” was the terrorism-fighting star of 38 original Pendleton novels and the character has gone on to star in hundreds of works of paperback fiction. He made his first appearance in 1969 in the novel War Against the Mafia.
“Don wrote the first novel in the series, ‘War Against the Mafia,’ out of his desire to express his discomfort with the reaction of many Americans to our soldiers who were dying for our country in the jungles of Vietnam and those coming home to outrageous verbal and physical abuse,” Linda Pendleton writes on the official site of her late husband. “So Mack Bolan became Don’s symbolic statement. He also became every soldier’s voice. Don created a heroic character in Bolan, a true hero who was dedicated to justice. The enemy that Bolan had to fight was no longer on the battlefields of Vietnam but right here on American soil, and that enemy was the Mafia.”
Mack Bolan is being adapted for the screen by Shane Salerno, whose work includes the fourth Avatar film.
(Photo Credit: FayesVision / WENN.com)
