Sony Buys A Script Called Supermax, Similar To But Different From WB's Green Arrow Movie Super Max

Oh, this is going to get confusing really fast. Over the past couple years, David Goyer and Justin Marks wrote drafts of a script called Super Max (or Supermax, as it is sometimes called, and more recently Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max) about the DC hero Green Arrow being trapped in a super-maximum security prison for super villains. Now Sony has bought a spec script called Supermax about...wait for it...a guard and a lethal inmate trying to survive in a maximum-security prison for super-natural inmates.

Bloody Disgusting has the new report, which concerns a script by Christopher Allan Nelson and Mitch Rouse. The synopsis follows:

Supermax takes place in a Maximum Security Prison for the Super-Natural as a skilled guard must join forces with a lethal inmate after a riot ensues in order to fight his way through various monsters and mad-men in order to survive.

That's quite a bit like Super Max; basically replace the guard with Green Arrow and the inmates with DC bad guys and the plots are uncomfortably close. Perhaps they don't play out in a similar enough manner for the WGA to worry about it. If sony hadn't paid a lot of money for this one (six figures, reportedly) I'd guess the buy was just to use the script as fodder to be recycled into a different film. But at that price tag we might actually see this movie.

Meanwhile, what's up with Super Max, the Green Arrow movie? MTV talked to David Goyer last month, who said "We're working on [Super Max]. We're about to bring on another writer. Obviously, Warner Bros. is now heavily into mining all of the various DC properties." In other words, it has been going nowhere. Now that WB and DC are changing up their game plan in a real way, however, maybe we'll see some actual movement, or a death blow.