Zac Efron Official for Johnny Quest
The LA Times is reporting that Zac Efron has officially signed on the star as the boy adventure, Johnny Quest in the live action version of the classic animated series. The script was written by Dan Mazeau and has been acclaimed by most people who have read it as a very impressive modern treatment on the character.
“Now it looks like the rumors are true and that the plum role is going to Zac Efron, the 21-year-old pretty-boy star who is hoping the action role will help him dance away from youth-pop vehicles and whip up a career-redefining franchise in the Indiana Jones mode. (Dwayne Johnson is circling the project as well and would be the brawny version of pilot and man-of-action Race Bannon.)”
Efron, 21 years old, is known better for his stint as the dancing and singing pop culture whore in the Disney High School Musical series. It seems he is now putting Disney and those films behind him as he taking more mature roles, even skipping out on a 6-7 figure deal and script approval for Footloose in an attempt to not keep the typecasting going in his career. Efron then took the role of Sam in a film adaptation of the Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud.
Efron has been mentioned often as interested in the role of Quest has another attempt to not only survive being typecasted but to also do a completely different set of movies he is used to. There has been some fan confusion over to what age Johnny would be in the film. In the animated version of the series, Johnny joins his father on adventures as an 11 year old kid, Efron surely doesn’t pass as someone that young. Speculation is and I would have to agree the studio and the script is calling for a slightly older Johnny for the film to market the film to more people. They can’t make the movie too youth oriented or it wouldn’t hit home with older fans and it would seem too much like Spy Kids or Agent Cody Banks, so the idea of Efron posing as a 16-17 year old Johnny makes a little more sense, at least to me.
I am glad he is official and would love to see him joined by Dwayne Johnson and Dev Patel in the film. Warner Brothers isn’t making any mistakes on Efron in my opinion, he is a rising star and has the ability to be the young, tech savy spawn of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.
