While James Wan is putting on his blockbuster shoes in a very big way with the upcoming, possibly Oscar winning "Furious 7," before he signed up to the gasoline smelling franchise, he was attached to direct the big screen version of television’s most handy hero, "MacGyver." Wan wound up making "Furious 7" instead, moving on from that reboot, and while there was a script in place by Jason Richman ("Swing Vote," "Bangkok Dangerous"), which was rewritten by Brian and Mark Gunn ("Bring It On Again," "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island"), the director has shared his own pretty wild concept for the "MacGyver" he wanted to make.
“…my initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right? He’s a really smart guy but he’s so smart he could never feel like he fit into a construct, or into a world that is an establishment. So he’s always a bit of an outsider… To cut a long story short, the idea here is I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a ‘North by Northwest,’” he told Crave.
“…in the context of the story he gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him. He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of ‘Enemy of the State.’ So imagine ‘Enemy of the State,’ if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.”
And you know? That’s not a bad idea. As for the status of the movie, Wan is no longer involved and he thinks New Line may no longer have the rights, but what do you think? Was this a version of "MacGyver" you would’ve been interested in checking out?