Spike Lee to Produce “Gordon Hemingway and the Realm of Cthulhu” for Netflix, With the Creators of See You Yesterday and Lovecraft Country's Jonathan Majors

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Image courtesy HBO

2020 was quite a year for Spike Lee, who had two major, critically-beloved streaming hits with Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne's American Utopia. It was also quite a year for Jonathan Majors, who – fresh off of the indie acclaim of The Last Black Man in San Francisco – starred in not only Da 5 Bloods, but one of the best and most exciting new TV shows of 2020, Misha Green's outstanding Lovecraft Country for HBO Max. Lovecraft Country was also part of a bold and exciting new wave of Lovecraftian horror that has been coming to our screens over the past couple years, taking the wonderfully unique fictional worlds and occult mythos of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, but flipping the script on Lovecraft's well-documented racism and bigotry. Now these dots are connecting in a very exciting way, as Jonathan Majors is in talks to reunite with producer Spike Lee for a new project – that once again flips the script on Lovecraft and brings us some new anti-racist Lovecraftian adventure/horror.

Lee is producing a new film for Netflix, called Gordon Hemingway and the Realm of Cthulhu, and Majors is currently in talks to star. The film will be written and directed by the duo behind 2019's Netflix time-travel movie See You Yesterday, writer Fredrica Bailey and director Stefon Bristol. The film will follow a Black American gunslinger and adventurer (the titular Gordon Hemingway, who will be played by Majors) in 1928 East Africa, who is enlisted by Ethiopian Warrior Princess Zenebe to join her on a mission to rescue a kidnapped Ethiopian regent from an ancient Lovecraftian evil. That is all that is currently known about the plot, but judging from the title, it seems a safe assumption that the story will take Hemingway and Zenebe beyond our reality and into Lovecraft's other worlds of monstrous elder gods and dark magic, which is always an exciting prospect. The plot sounds like a blend of equal parts Lovecraftian horror and vintage adventure serial thrills of the kind that Indiana Jones tapped into – a combination which the genre-blending Lovecraft Country explored in some episodes with excellent results. And as with Misha Green's series, by telling a Lovecraftian adventure/horror story from a Black perspective, the film will subvert the author's well-documented racism, and reclaim the legacy of Lovecraftian fiction from its famously problematic creator, continuing what has been a very welcome movement in genre fiction in recent years.

We will be following this production closely and posting more news as it comes. Gordon Hemingway and the Realm of Cthulhu definitely sounds like a film to be very excited about.

- Christopher S. Jordan


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