DEATHLOCK

Real Name: Luther Manning

Identity/Class: Alternate Earth (Reality-62151) human cyborg

Occupation: Corporate trainer

Group Membership: None

Affiliations: None

Enemies: Modok, Modok's unidentified agency, perhaps others (see comments)

Known Relatives: Unidentified wife, unidentified stepson

Aliases: None

Base of Operations: Unrevealed

First Appearance: Deathlock (proposed movie, announced 2001, scheduled for 2006)

Powers/Abilities: Deathlok had a computer wired into his brain, liquid metal armor that could appear when needed, greatly improved vision and hearing, and the ability to generate weapons almost out of thin air.

Height: Unrevealed; perhaps 5'8" (see comments)
Weight: Unrevealed (see comments)
Eyes: Yellow or white
Hair: None

History:
(Deathlock movie) - Luther Manning was a hard working corporate trainer, a loving husband, and a good step-father to his wife's son from her previous marriage. Unfortunately for him, he was also chosen by Modok, a scientist working for a secret government agency, to be an unwitting test subject for their nanotechnology. Having already tested it on volunteers from the military, Modok now wanted to see what the tech would do to a regular man, so to this end his agency staged a car crash with the Mannings while they were out celebrating Luther's latest promotion. Luther woke in the hospital unaware that he had been infected with technology that was literally slowly rebuilding him from the inside out, and as time passed and more of his body was modified Luther risked losing contact with his humanity entirely and becoming a mindless automaton.

Comments: Created by Stu Zickerman, Raven Mentzner and Constantine Sekeris.

   There was an earlier Deathlok movie proposed in the 1990s, but it came to nothing. In 2001 Paramount optioned the rights, and initially assigned Lee Tamahori to direct, later switching this to Paul McGuigan. The script was written by Stu Zickerman and Raven Mentzner, with David Self then coming on to do rewrites. McGuigan is on record saying he wanted Robert Downey Jr., whose career was then on a downturn, to play the role. However Marvel Studios apparently decided to call the project off.

  Visual effects artist Constantine Sekeris did some design sketches for the character in 2002 for EdgeFX, and much more recently published them on his Instagram, which is where two images on this page originate. One obviously shows a much more robotic looking version, but given that the script apparently had Deathlock being able to manifest liquid armor and gradually becoming less human it could be that both versions are correct depictions, just at different points in his transformation. On these images Sekeris spells the character's name as Deathlock, with an additional c before the k, unlike the standard Deathlok spelling. I'm not sure if he just had a typo (though he used this spelling on both images), or whether the movie script used this spelling, but since it's the only documentation we have and it does make the name distinct from other versions, I've used that version in this profile. News sources such as Hollywood Reporter did use the original spelling, but whether that was because it was the correct spelling for the movie version, or just the correct spelling for the comics one, is hard to say.

   With only design sketches to go on, it's hard to figure out his height, but given they wanted to use RDJ, I'm ASSuming that Deathlock would have been around that actor's height. Weight is harder, if not impossible to determine, since it would depend on the percentage and material of his bionics. His eyes were either white (see image to left) or one white and one red (see image to right).

   Though the only villain mentioned in script reviews is Modok, a "weird professor" type rather than the giant headed killing machine MODOK of the comics, given that the script reviews do mention prior test subjects there might well have been soldier cyborgs around with powers similar to Deathlok to give the hero more of a challenge.

   Per Lester Livermore's inSCRIPTions Screenplay Review, "This script is a very loose adaptation of the comic. What remains is Luther’s name, the name of the antagonist, the cyborg aspect and the theme of self-determination. Everything else goes into the trashcan. “Deathlok” purists, assuming there is such a thing, will be disappointed. In fact, apart from the title page, the name Deathlok appears only once in the script, and that is a note from the writer’s acknowledging a moment as being a nod to the comic."

Profile by Loki.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Deathlock has no known connections to:

Modok

Modok was a "weird professor" who worked for a covert government agency and experimented with nanotechnology to rebuild humans as super-powered cyborgs. He wanted to go down in history as another DaVinci.

--Deathlock

images: (without ads)
Constantine Sekeris' Instagram (both images)

Appearances:
Deathlock (proposed movie, announced 2001, scheduled for 2006) - Stu Zickerman, Raven Mentzner, David Self (writers), Constantine Sekeris (design sketches), Lee Tamahori, Paul McGuigan (directors)

First Posted: 09/01/2024
Last updated: 09/01/2024

Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.

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