Breck Eisner Eyes 'Blood Of The Innocent' As A Directorial Gig

Breck Eisner looks to be the new Len Wiseman or Stephen Sommers — he's lining up one high concept tentpole after another in the wake of the reasonable opening of his remake of The Crazies. He's got the Escape From New York remake up next, and is booked for the new Flash Gordon movie and there is still occasional talk about remaking David Cronenberg's The Brood, though (fortunately) that seems unlikely to happen.

Now he also apparently has an adaptation of the mid-'80s 'Dracula meets Jack the Ripper' indie comic book series Blood of the Innocent, which could happen after Escape From New York.

Fear.net talked to Mark Wheatley of Insight Studios, co-writer of Blood of the Innocent. He said,

[Eisner is] trying to make Blood of the Innocent the picture he does after Escape. He and the writer have been working on the pitch. The writer, Bill Marsilii, has been working on the pitch now for almost a year. But Breck came on board, I think, back in February. And so the two of them met several times and honed the pitch and worked out a "live" version of the pitch. [Laughs.] The two of them put that two-person act on the road and they've been going around to the various studios making the pitch.

Bill Marsilii was just in the news yesterday, as he's the guy writing that new adaptation of The Wind in the Willows for which WETA is doing animatronic effects.Blood of the Innocent was published in 1986 by Wendy and Richard Pini's Warp Graphics imprint. I never liked the Pini's mainstay Elfquest, so I didn't read this one at the time, but I remember it mostly as an early example of work by Marc Hempel, who grew into a pretty great and often underrated artist. (His 'The Kindly Ones' arc on Sandman was magnificent; some of the best, most striking art featured in Neil Gaiman's series.)

If you want more of a synopsis for Blood of the Innocent, Wheatley has you covered:

It's Dracula versus Jack the Ripper... [Laughs.] That's it. That's the whole concept.