Movies

'Project Power' Directors To Helm 'Nemesis', A Revamped Film Adaptation Of Mark Millar's Comic

Nemesis directors
By Ben Pearson/

Way back in 2009, before comic book writer Mark Millar had even completed his comic, Nemesis, he was talking about its movie potential. The story, which boils down to "what if, instead of becoming a superhero, a genius billionaire embraced anarchy and became the world's worst supervillain?", unquestionably had a hell of a hook, and Hollywood spent years trying to adapt it into a film, with directors like Sam Raimi, Guy Ritchie, Tony Scott, and Joe Carnahan potentially directing at various points and actors like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp's names being bandied about as possible stars.

The comic was published ten years ago, and a Nemesis movie has yet to materialize. But Warner Bros. has just hired the guys behind Netflix's Project Power as the new Nemesis directors, so the movie isn't dead yet.

Collider reports that Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, the filmmakers behind Catfish, several of the Paranormal Activity sequels, Nerve, Viral, and Netflix's Project Power, have been tapped as the latest directors to try their hand at bringing Nemesis to the big screen. According to Collider, "the story is said to follow a genius engineer who witnesses the President of the United States commit a deadly crime and teams up with a vigilante to take down the President and his corrupt government."

The original Nemesis comic does involve the president, but the villain at the center of the story kidnaps the Commander in Chief, hijacks Air Force One, and kills hundreds (and eventually tens of thousands) of innocent people in Washington, D.C. and at the Pentagon. This sounds like a starkly different story than what Millar originally cooked up for his comic – and he said as much in a tweet reacting to this news:

Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve, Promising Young Woman) wrote the latest draft of the script. In 2013, Millar read a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Joe Carnahan and absolutely flipped for it, promising that the resulting film would be "one of the best movies of the decade" and "the biggest and smartest action movie we've all seen in a very, very long time." Of course, that version never happened, and I'm very curious to see exactly how Fennell, Joost, and Schulman are going to tweak and tinker with this story after such a long gestation period.

From this new brief description, it doesn't even sound much like the original story at all. But in that same Twitter thread above, Millar confirmed that a sequel comic will be arriving eventually, because he has "big plans for the comic a year or so down the line." So if the movie ends up being a total swerve from the comic story, at least fans of the comic will be able to return to that world again.

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