Look, I can only take so much, and the constant social media and comic book "news" website rumors about who might or might not be playing Booster Gold in the not-yet-materialized James Gunn DCEU are about to break me. Chris Pratt? Aaron Paul? Jessie Plemons? Sure. Fine. Whatever.

Actors are the least of my problem. I'm still not even certain what I want from a Booster Gold movie, much less who I want to play him.

The first Harry Potter film proved to me that I need a movie to be notably different from the printed source material, otherwise why bother watching it? My imagination is pretty darn good, thank you very much. I don't think the published works of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name just two examples, are notably improved by their many cinema adaptations. That means I personally require the adventures of movie Booster to be different from Booster's comic book stories in some way.

But how different? I certainly don't need to see Blackguard or Black Beetle. I probably won't be too upset if Booster has a friend other than Ted Kord or a love interest other than Trixie Collins. But I suspect I will be disappointed not to see Skeets, very preferably as a gravity-defying golden football. Would a David "Booster" Gold who solves comedic supernatural mysteries while wearing a yellow raincoat be remotely satisfying? Definitely not.

That there are so many people talking about who they want in a Booster Gold movie certainly suggests that there's great interest. And I think it'd be great for even more people to discover the Greatest Hero They've Never Heard Of. But I just don't get a lot of entertainment value from random speculation about who or what we might be getting, especially when I'm so uncertain about what I might want.

So if you're wondering why I don't comment more on each latest Casting Rumor Of The Day, that's why.

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My mailbox is full with "news" sites reporting that in an exclusive interview with CBR.com, Chris Pratt has broken his silence on whether or not he'll play Booster Gold!

"As far as DC characters pan, I don't know. I will let the fans tell me what they would want me to do. I don't have anything official to announce. I haven't spoken to James Gunn in any capacity to where he's offered me anything like that."

So there you have it. If you want Chris Pratt to play Booster Gold, tell him. If you don't, tell him. Apparently, he's listening.

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It seems everywhere I go online in the past week, I bump into someone's opinion about whether Chris Pratt should be cast as Booster Gold in any film in new DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn's DC Extended Universe.

That should be expected, I assume. In large part thanks to his role in a Gunn movie franchise, Pratt is Hollywood's current go-to actor for action comedy, and most people assume that any live-action Booster would be a funny man of action.

You might think that I, as a Booster Gold fan, also have an opinion on whether or not Pratt should play my hero. But I don't.

This comes up every few years (see previous blog posts in 2010 and 2015). Assuming that Booster ever does make it to the big screen in my lifetime, all I really care about is seeing Booster characterized as he is the comics: a well-intentioned soul whose need for outside approval and material wealth drives him to do things that aren't necessarily so heroic.

Booster's exterior cockiness is a mask hiding his deep-seeded feelings of inadequacy, and any actor who can portray that with humor and charm is probably good enough for me. Even if that's Chris Pratt.

Booster Gold #1

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