Although he doesn’t wear a costume in the traditional sense, you can now add another superhuman to the superhero movie onslaught of the next five years; Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, who together recently had great success with their movie Lone Survivor, are teaming up once again for a big screen version of The Six Billion Dollar Man for the Weinstein’s Dimension Pictures. Yes, I said six billion — this stuff costs a lot more than it did in the seventies. Inflation, baby.

For those of you youngins’ who just read the above and have no idea what I’m talking about, The Six Million Dollar Man was a highly successful television series which ran for five seasons from 1974-78. Starring ’70s icon (and former Mr. Farrah Fawcett) Lee Majors, the show’s premise was that former astronaut Steve Austin, after being critically injured while piloting an experimental plane that crashes, is then is saved by doctors when he is fitted with a host of advanced bionic replacements — both of his legs, his right arm and left eye. Essentially now superpowered, he becomes a secret agent for a government organization called OSI, the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Steve Austin goes on to do all kinds of incredible feats that have these awesome sounds effects whenever he does them. He also wore an amazing track suit and even fought Bigfoot. The show also notably produced a successful spin-off with The Bionic Woman. 

There have been other attempts in recent years to bring this property to the big screen; Kevin Smith famously wrote a screenplay that never got made, but eventually got turned into a comic book, and comedic versions set to star Chris Rock and Jim Carrey were even attempted. Hopefully the Wahlberg/Berg version has more luck getting off the ground that those did.

[HT: Deadline]