Marvel has entered into an agreement with Dimension Films, a subdivision of Miramax, to develop a film based on the relatively short-lived 1980s comic Cloak and Dagger. Comic scribe David Tischman (Cable, Son of Superman, American Century) is writing the screenplay. The success of Blade and the X-Men has led to a situation in which an unprecedented number of Marvel-based movies are in various stages of development including, Spider-man (see 'The Swami Looks at Movies in 2001'), Ghost Rider, FF, The Incredible Hulk (see 'Crouching Behemoth, Hidden Hero'), Blade II, and X-Men II, to name just a few.
Spider-Man, which features Toby McGuire as the stealthy webslinger, is set for an early release next summer. If the big-budget Spidey saga is a hit, the spate of Marvel inspired films will undoubtedly continue unabated. One might think that film producers anxious to climb on the Marvel bandwagon are reaching quite far down into Marvel's bag of 4,700 proprietary characters to come up with Cloak and Dagger, but then Blade was hardly one of Marvel's key characters either, and the Blade film was successful enough to spawn a sequel. Like Blade, Cloak and Dagger has a streetwise urban feel to the storyline, and it was the success of Blade rather than of the X-Men that probably led to the agreement to develop Cloak and Dagger for the screen. If Cloak and Dagger does get transformed into a film, it should be interesting to see what title the studio puts on it since there have been at least two previous films with the title Cloak and Dagger including a Fritz Lang helmed 1940s spy drama and a 1980s kid flick.
