Leigh Whannell's upcoming The Green Hornet & Kato will probably be a very different take on the two characters. Horror movie scribe and director Leigh Whannell has boarded to direct The Green Hornet and Kato for Universal Pictures, with the film to be the latest modern take on the property since 2011's The Green Hornet with Seth Rogen and Jay Chou. While The Green Hornet franchise has gone through several iterations, its best-known version remains obvious.
That version is the '60s TV series The Green Hornet, led by Van Williams as Britt Reid a.k.a. the Green Hornet, and the legendary Bruce Lee as Kato, with the series being renamed The Kato Show in Hong Kong. Though The Green Hornet did not share the campy tone of the Batman TV series of the same era - the two shows even having a crossover at one point with Bruce Lee's Kato fighting Burt Ward's Robin - The Green Hornet and Kato could venture its two heroes into considerably darker and rougher territory. The main reason for that tone shift is the involvement of Leigh Whannell as director.
Whannell famously got the Saw franchise rolling with James Wan, with the two later creating new horror movie series with Insidious and The Conjuring. Whannell's own career as a director has also been very horror-laden, including in his first action-heavy movie, Upgrade. These factors indicate that Whannell boarding The Green Hornet and Kato as director could lead to it undergoing a somewhat mature re-imagining, and this could all be a very smart choice.
Why A Darker Green Hornet Reboot Would Be The Right Choice
The Green Hornet and Kato with a darker tone could work on several levels, principally in how the film could re-imagine Britt Reid and the martial arts master Kato themselves. It's never been a secret that Kato has been the real reason behind the franchise's staying power, something the Green Hornet reboot's title acknowledges and which it could build on their re-imagined partnership. The Green Hornet and Kato with a tone closer to Whannell's horror movies could also re-introduce the characters to modern audiences as a hard-hitting crime story that couldn't have been on late '60s cable.
Additionally, the tone Whannell is accustomed to working with could facilitate some appropriately impactful martial arts fights on Kato's part. With Bruce Lee having given such iconography to Kato, no Green Hornet reboot is doing its job without delivering some solid martial arts battles. Whannell's horror movie background and previous fight scene experience in Upgrade could adopt a very modern approach to The Green Hornet and Kato's action scenes, giving them a flair fittingly akin to The Raid movies blended with the legacy of Bruce Lee's Kato.
While Whannell is not likely to turn his take on the Green Hornet and Kato's crime-fighting adventures into an outright horror movie, his experience in scaring audiences could enable him to bring something completely new to the property. The Green Hornet and Kato, under Leigh Whannell's direction, seems very likely to have a noticeably grittier tone with the potential for very impactful martial arts of the sort Bruce Lee would surely have loved to showcase. In going that route, The Green Hornet and Kato could do something very memorable and unique with its heroic protagonists.