Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg working on a Spenser reboot.
With a movie reboot of The Six Million Dollar Man in the pipeline, it appears that Mark Wahlberg has his sights firmly set on bringing back the TV heroes of his (and our own) youth and now another announcement has been made confirming this with Deadline reporting that Netflix has made a deal with Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg and the Robert B. Parker estate to bring back for a potential series of films featuring the character Spenser, the poetry-spouting, wisecracking boxer-turned-Boston-based private eye made famous in 40 novels by Parker, and in three seasons of the ‘80s TV series that starred Robert Urich.
Although the first film will be an adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, which is one of the eight Spenser mystery novels written by Ace Atkins, who took over the series after Parker died in 2010.
The movie is said to differ from the novel in that it begins with Spenser emerging from a prison stretch, stripped of his private investigator license. He quickly gets pulled back into the underbelly of the Boston crime world when he uncovers the truth about a sensational murder and the twisted conspiracy behind it.
The hope of Netflix and the filmmakers is to make this more than just a one-off. Wahlberg and Berg are frequent collaborators having previously worked together on several projects including Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, the upcoming STX release Mile 22, as well as co-producing the Dwayne Johnson HBO series Ballers.