Ending what would have been one of the weirder actor-director reunion projects in recent memory, Daniel Craig will no longer be following his Luca Guadagnino collaboration Queer by starring in a DC Comics war movie for the acclaimed director. Per THR, Craig is no longer attached to star in an adaptation of Sgt. Rock, the classic military comic that Guadagnino is directing for some reason, working from a script from Challengers and Queer writer Justin Kurtizkes.
We’ll be honest: We remain extremely confused by this project, which sounds odd even by the standards of James Gunn’s fairly diverse approach to developing projects for his nascent DC Comics movie universe. The old Sgt. Rock comics, created by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert in 1959 (and previously published as Our Army At War before adopting their hero’s name as their title), really couldn’t be simpler: Rock and his Easy Company go on World War II missions, get into dangerous scrapes, and kill an enormous number of Nazis. (If that sounds familiar, Rock and Easy appeared in a flashback in a recent episode of Gunn’s Creature Commandos.) Given that the comics are fairly straightforward efforts to import war movie stories and aesthetics into the comic book medium, we’re genuinely not sure what a twisty type like Guadagnino finds interesting enough to tackle with this material. (Previous Hollywood efforts to adapt the character, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis both in contention at different points across the decade, at least made a certain kind of sense; even Guadagnino’s more backwards-looking “Let’s remake Suspiria!” impulses feel too odd to fit in here.)
But we digress: Craig is apparently out, with THR positing either scheduling conflicts, or the slightly juicier idea that he wasn’t happy with Queer flopping at the box office while also failing to pick up any award season heat. That same report suggests that the studio might now be pursuing The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White to star in the film, a bizarre mental image that brings us back to the same question we keep asking every time this project comes up in the news: What the fuck is this movie supposed to be?
