News about Pixar and Andrew Stanton's live-action John Carter of Mars is now coming thick and fast. We only just learned that Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins were signed up, but now it seems that Thomas Hayden Church is a distinct possibility.
Check out this interview at Reel Talk, where Church states that he's "probably going to do a huge science fiction drama at Disney called John Carter of Mars". No word so far on who he might play, but Church describes it as "a very dramatic role" and differentiates it from his comedy bad-guy in the incoming Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That.
Church's last big fantasy role was as The Sandman in Spider-Man 3, which might suggest that villainy is on the cards again. But the third principal character in Edgar Rice Burroughs' first John Carter novel, A Princess of Mars, is actually a sidekick: Carter's (eventual) buddy, the green-skinned Martian warrior Tars Tarkas.
With a character arc that goes from antagonist to ally, renegade to hero, Tarkas would seem to have all the drama that Church implies, and he's in subsequent books, meaning the character has serious franchise potential. It's just speculation, but it seems to us that character and actor are a pretty good fit.
So, do green Hellboy prosthetics for Thomas Haden Church sound promising?