Based on Lee Falk's comic strip The Phantom by King Features, the film stars Billy Zane as a seemingly immortal crimefighter and his battle against all forms of evil.

There he is given the Skull Ring, swears to devote his life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, and as an adult, adopts the identity of "The Phantom", a masked avenger.

Drax's female air pirates led by femme fatale, Sala, hijack the plane; Diana is abducted and taken to their waterfront base in Bengalla.

Having been informed of Diana's abduction by the Jungle Patrol's captain, Phillip Horton, the Phantom rescues her and escapes from Quill and his men to his headquarters, the Skull Cave.

Leone had started to write a script and scout locations for his proposed film version of the Phantom, which he planned to be followed by an adaptation of Lee Falk's other comic-strip hero, Mandrake the Magician.

Joe Dante was originally attached to direct a Phantom film for Paramount Pictures in the early 1990s, and he developed a draft of the script together with Jeffrey Boam.

Many unintentionally funny moments were cut after a raucous test screening and I foolishly refused money to take my name off the picture, so I'm credited as one of a zillion producers.

Zane, a huge fan of the comic strip after being introduced to it on the set of Dead Calm,[8] won the part after competition from Bruce Campbell and New Zealand actor Kevin Smith.

Production designer Paul Peters changed a deserted warehouse in the town Krabi into a large sound stage, where the Phantom's Skull Cave abode was erected, including his Chronicle Chamber, vault, and radio and treasure rooms.

In December, the crew traveled to Australia, where production occupied eight sound stages at the Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast, Queensland.

Filming in Queensland also took the production to the Brisbane City Hall, where the interior lobby was redecorated to resemble a New York museum, where Kit Walker finds one of the three Skulls of Touganda.

[14] The film features several elements from Lee Falk's first two Phantom stories from the 1936 daily newspaper strips, "The Singh Brotherhood" and "The Sky Band".

Several of the characters in the film derive from these stories: Kabai Sengh (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), leader of the Sengh Brotherhood (the name of the brotherhood was changed to 'Sengh' in the film, to avoid offending people named Singh), Sala (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones), leader of the Sky Band, a group of female air pirates, and Jimmy Wells (Jon Tenney), a wealthy playboy.

[citation needed] The more realistic plots of Falk's original stories were dropped in favor of an adventure tale that featured the supernatural "Skulls of Touganda".

The film suffered the same fate as two other period-piece comic book/pulp adaptations of the 1990s, The Rocketeer (1991) and The Shadow (1994), and did not fare well at the box office in the United States, debuting at number six the weekend of June 7, 1996.

[4][better source needed] [19] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 44% rating based on 48 reviews, with the site's consensus: "The script gives Billy Zane little to work with, and thus he plays the Phantom as a friendly but completely one-dimensional hero".

With a straight-arrow hero and villains that wouldn't scare a tadpole, it holds our interest via its human scale and the pleasure it takes in being true to its origins".

He praised the director's synergy with the script and actors, and approved of how the action sequences rely on practical stunts rather than computer generated images, saying this lends faithfulness to the character's pulp roots.

[24] Godfrey Cheshire in Variety that the film "brings a light touch to appealingly old-fashioned action material, creating a fast-moving yarn".

He approved of the decision to sidestep the Phantom's African origin (which was considered racially insensitive by the time of the film's release) instead of reworking it, and while he acknowledged that the character's portrayal is two-dimensional, he felt that this was also appropriate to the old-fashioned tone.

[26] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly reviled the title character as hopelessly outdated, adding that "as the Phantom, Billy Zane, buff to the max, has a likable insouciance, but there's not much he can do to flesh out this relic.

With its generic stunts and chases, its hand-me-down cheeseball mysticism (the plot hinges on a hunt for magic skulls), the film, while crisply shot, has even less personality than such crusader retreads as The Rocketeer and The Shadow".