Two New Zac Efron Films - One Recalling The Bourne Films, The Other Back To The Future

I don't remember when it was I first heard of Brian Michael Bendis but I remember how, and I remember that I was holding a copy of his comic book Fire in my hands at the time. I'd pretty much forgotten it, if I'm being honest, but I do have a faint, fuzzy fondness for what I can recall and therefore I'm pretty happy to report it's being made into a movie, and happier still that Bendis is getting to write the adaptation himself. His leading man is set to be none other than Zac Efron, who I've liked just fine in everything I've seen him in, even when those things themselves were not entirely likeable.

Last Friday, it seems, the actor and writer went out together to a handful of studios and ended up making a deal with Universal. He tweeted about it at the time, though only now do I quite see what he was getting at:

Heading to Warner brothers with my mystery movie star pal

Leaving universal. My job here is done. Chik fil a put the nuggets in the fryer!!

In Fire, the comic, the lead character is a young jewish man recruited from school to join the CIA. Hes told that he's the first recruit of Project Fire, an initiative to try and turn ordinary citizen into operatives. Of course, that's not quite true and this chap ends up having to go a bit Bourne.

Fire is just one of two projects that Efron has newly slated. The other is not quite so easy to explain or, at this stage, understand.

According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, this second film is a mash-up of two pre-existing projects: Algorithm, which was being developed by Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Nicholas Stoller; and an untitled pitch by Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, screenwriters of Assassination of a High School President. I can't really divine any information on either of those projects, let alone on what they'll become when stuffed in the blender together, but the Deadline report compares the resulting blend  to Back to the Future. What the similarity is, they're not saying. Maybe it's time travel, maybe it's the oedipus thing or maybe it's the teenage boy/eccentric older scientist friendship...?

So far, there's no way of knowing what this second film will even be about, let alone if it will be any good. The inevitable outpouring of prejudice might as well be based upon the fact that " Zac Efron does Back to the Future" is an anagram of "Bad account freezes hooker tuft".