When a guy in a cape and mask is leaping between buildings, it’s easy to assume you’re watching a comic book adaptation. But when a master thief attempts to make a living in a world of organized crime and violence, the line between comic book and straight fiction is blurred. Some of the best comic book adaptations – A History of Violence, Road to Perdition – aren’t easily identified as such and now one of the best writers in comics will attempt to join that elite niche of cinema.
Multiple Eisner Award-winning writer Ed Brubaker has just signed to adapt the first arc in his Criminal comic series, Coward, into a live action film. David Slade, director of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and upcoming Daredevil reboot, is attached to direct. Read More »
Mike Flemming has learned that 20th Century Fox is developing a big screen adaptation of Ed Brubaker‘s graphic novel Incognito. Fox has hired Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Kentucky Cycle, to pen the big screen adaptation.
For those of you who didn’t read the six-issue comic book limited series when it was published last year, it follows a former super villain named Zack Overkill, who is in the Witness Protection Program after giving testimony against his former boss The Black Death. Overkill is required to take a drug that eliminates his super abilities, given a new identity and a job delivering mail in an office.
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A couple months ago it was announced that Tom Cruise would star in an adaptation of the Wildstorm comic book Sleeper for producer Sam Raimi. Well apparently the star is not yet formerly attached, but is still interested. Warner Bros has hired newbie scribe Brad Ingelsby (The Honeyfields) to pen a script. Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio are attached to his first script sale, Low Dweller, which Relativity Media purchased for $500,000 against $1 million.
Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, the story follows a covert “sleeper” operative named Holden Carver (aka The Conductor), who is fused with an alien artifact that makes him not only impervious to pain , but also able to pass it along to others through skin contact. Carver has been placed undercover in a villainous organization led by TAO (a WildC.A.T.s villain from Alan Moore’s run). But when the only guy who knows that he is an undercover agent goes into a coma, Carver must question right and wrong, as he falls and for a member of the group while rising through he ranks.
Sleeper placed #81 on Comic Book Resource’s top 100 comic book runs of all time. Aside from being a spin-off of WildC.A.T.s, Sleeper also features characters from Gen 13. Warner Bros hopes to turn the project into a franchise. I haven’t read the series, but the synopsis certainly sounds interesting enough for the big screen.
Update: Ridley Scott and Leonardo Dicaprio are not attached to Sleeper. Variety originally confused the project Ingelsby’s last screenplay adaptation, Low Dweller.
source: Variety
