The Night Stalker (Johnny Depp to star)

[detective392]

Johnny Depp Meets The Night Stalker

This could very well be Johnny Depp's version of a mid-life crisis: portraying all of his childhood favorite characters on the big screen. It's starting with the currently shooting Dark Shadows, in which he'll play vampire Barnabas Collins; will continue with him as Tonto in The Lone Ranger and now comes word he'll play reporter Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker.

Writes Deadline in an exclusive report, "Depp had fond memories of the ABC telepic and series The Night Stalker, and got Disney's Rich Ross and Sean Bailey sparked on a pitch for Depp to potentially play tabloid reporter Carl Kolchak. Originated by Darren McGavin, Kolchak was the dogged journalist first seen in the 1972 telepic (where he hunted a killer who was draining the blood of beautiful girls on the Las Vegas strip) and later in the ABC series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Kolchak's investigations always seemed to lead him to the doorstep of vampires, zombies, werewolves and aliens. For its time, it was pretty scary stuff. The studio will go out to writers shortly. David Kennedy will be exec producer."

Deadline failed to mention that there was a 1973 TV movie called The Night Strangler (co-starring Richard Dean Anderson as the creature, soon to be cast as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man). There was also a teleplay for a third TV movie called The Night Killers, about robot duplicates being put in the place of people in crucial power positions. Additionally, in 2005 X-Files producer Frank Spotnitz served as the guiding force behind a revamped version of the show, there have been a number of novels and a wide variety of comic book adventures as well.

The two TV movies were directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis and written by legendary writer Richard Matheson. The '70s TV series was guided by David Chase, who would go on to create The Sopranos.

Would love for this to happen as we don't have many supernatural detective movies and was a fan of the original and reboot series. While many will hate the idea of Johnny starring I'm excited and think he would be good in the role.

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