Is Mark Wahlberg a Bionic Man?

Mark Wahlberg has been trying to become a franchise player for a long time now. He tried with Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. He tried with Max Payne. He tried with The Italian Job. Now, it looks like he might be succeeding. Not only does he have a sequel to Ted coming out, but he is the new human face of the Transformers franchise and now The Tracking Board has suggested that Wahlberg will star in the Universal Pictures reboot of The Six Million Dollar Man.

For those who haven’t heard of this, The Six Million Dollar Man is an old TV show that starred Lee Majors as Steve Austin, a former astronaut who was involved in an aircraft crash. He was saved and then rebuilt from the ground up, giving him bionic powers including super speed, strength and long range vision and hearing.

The Six Million Dollar Man also fought Bigfoot once, played by none other than Andre the Giant.

This also led to a spin-off television series called The Bionic Woman, which has already been rebooted once back in 2007. However, a new version of The Six Million Dollar Man has never happened until now.

There was supposed to be a movie many years ago with Jim Carrey in the lead, which would have been a horrible idea. Todd Phillips (The Hangover) was set to direct that one. Then Bryan Singer circled it with Leonardo DiCaprio up for the role of Steve Austin. Kevin Smith also wrote a screenplay adaptation that was never made, but was turned into his own comic book called The Bionic Man.

The biggest problem with the past attempts to make the movie was that Universal held the rights to The Six MillionDollar Man but Miramax held the rights to the novel Cyborg, which the original television series was based on. In 2011, all the rights issues were worked out and Universal Pictures got the full rights to make the reboot.

Peter Berg, who just directed Lone Survivor with Mark Wahlberg, will direct the big screen version of The Six Million Dollar Man and Harvey Weinstein will produce the film.