Firestorm (1998)
Firestorm was originally written as a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, however when the production company Savoy Pictures went bankrupt the screenplay was bought by Twentieth Fox and the scope of the movie reduced to suit a lower budget. It’s broadly similar to Cliffhanger in so far as the lead character is a specialist in a certain field who runs afoul of criminals in a perilous environment. Whereas Cliffhanger is set in the Rocky Mountains, Firestorm takes place in the forests of Northern Wyoming. After the script was revised four times, the finished screenplay was given a final “polish” by Graham Yost who has considerable experience with the action movie genre. As stallone was no longer associated with the project and the production had been repurposed to be less extravagant, the movie was assigned to former NFL star Howie Long. Long had already appeared in the John Woo movie Broken Arrow (1996) and the Firestorm was seen as a means to give him a star vehicle.
Gerry Anderson’s Firestorm
Firestorm originally started as a Japanese anime series co-created by Gerry Anderson and John Needham back in 2003. The show combined CGI animation for mecha and traditional cel animation for characters and the environment. Despite the quality of the production and an emphasis on the futuristic hardware that has always been a core tenet of Gerry Anderson productions, the anime version of Firestorm didn’t find an audience in Japan. The show subsequently failed to secure a wider release and so became a more obscure part of Anderson Canon. However, in 2014 Anderson Entertainment (under the auspices of Jamie Anderson, Gerry’s son) announced a crowdfunding campaign to produce a pilot episode for a new television series of Firestorm using practical film-making techniques including miniature effects and puppetry. It’s been a long road since then but today a debut “minisode” was shown at MCM Comic-Con London and simultaneously released on You Tube.