HOLLYWOOD -- It amuses Morgan Freeman that, in Alex Cross, he has created a franchise character.

Alex Cross is the Washington D.C. detective and profiler created by best-selling novelist James Patterson in Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls and Pop Goes the Weasel.

Freeman first portrayed Cross in Kiss the Girls and revived him for Along Came a Spider which opens Friday.

Patterson and Paramount Pictures are hoping Freeman will commit to several more Cross films. "I'm really up in the air about what to do. I don't know whether to retire Alex or give him another outing," says Freeman, who took an executive producer credit for Spider so he could have more control of the project.

"I'm not really certain franchise characters work in the movies. James Bond is the one real exception. Characters like Jessica Fletcher, Columbo and Sherlock Holmes hold up much better on TV. Movies have to be more in depth and that takes much better writing. I'll only do another Alex Cross film if someone comes up with a great screenplay."

In Along Came a Spider, Cross teams with a disgraced Secret Service agent whose team failed to prevent the kidnapping of a politician's young daughter. Monica Potter plays the agent. In the novel, the two had an affair.

There isn't even a hint of sexual tension between Freeman, 63, and Potter, 29, in the film and that suits Freeman just fine.

"There was talk about keeping the affair in for all of about three seconds. I thought the affair made Alex look a little stupid," says Freeman.

His director Lee Tamahori agrees. "If we had had Morgan jump into bed with Monica Potter that would have made Alex look sleazy."

Tamahori stresses "for Morgan and the rest of us, the worry was not the racial thing. It was the age difference that bothered us."

Patterson says when he was writing Along Came a Spider, the novel which first introduced Cross, he had only one African American role model in mind.

"I envisioned a young Muhammad Ali ... Morgan is a fine actor so I couldn't be more pleased he became Alex Cross."

Freeman and his wife now live on a ranch outside Charlestown, S.C., which has caused many of his colleagues to scratch their heads.

"There is this erroneous belief that if you're not living in Los Angeles you're not going to get work. I've never bought into that," says Freeman, who just completed filming the courtroom drama High Crimes, which reunites him with his Kiss the Girls co-star Ashley Judd.

Later this month he begins working on The Sum of All Fears, the film version of the Tom Clancy novel, which stars Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan. And he's looking forward to making his directing debut next year.

"I have purchased the film rights to A Day No Pigs Would Die a powerful coming-of-age story set in Mississippi in the Depression. Ideally I'd like to be able to film in Mississippi, but for budgetary reasons I bet we'll be taking it to Canada, probably Alberta. Longview could conceivably double for Mississippi.

"I had a great experience there when I filmed Unforgiven."


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