Of all the dangers that videogames apparently offer, I'd never heard "your game avatar comes to life and solves crime" being mentioned, before Stan Lee's latest creation. This, from the man who gave us Spider-Man?
Lee's newest brainwave, Nick Ratchet, is described by the Hollywood Reporter like this:
The lighthearted mystery thriller centers on a Jekyll & Hyde struggle between a meek, ineffectual police officer and his online alter-ego, a tough avatar cop named Nick Ratchet who emerges from inside a video game to usurp the life of his creator.
We're torn between optimism based on the potential comedy of any good Jekyll & Hyde story and utter sadness over the sheer level of "Hey, I read about this thing called 'the internet'! What if a video game character from 'the internet' came to life? Excelsior, true believers!" that the pitch exudes from every pore. Add in the fact that the project is going to see life as a Disney movie, and that feeling of dread and disappointment just grows.
(To be fair to Lee, he's not actually going to be writing the movie, he just came up with the basic idea. The movie's writers will be Douglas Cook and David Weisberg, who have previously given the world The Rockand Ashley Judd-"thriller" Double Jeopardy. What was that I was saying about a feeling of dread...?)
Writers tapped for 'Ratchet' [Hollywood Reporter]