Adaptations

Warner Brothers and Alcon Entertainment are developing a film about Looney Tunes character Marvin the Martian. Right now it’ll be a Christmas movie, with a mix of live action and animation.

Producer Erwin Stoff is in the early stages of developing a live action version of Cowboy Bebop for Fox. The anime is a multi genre show is about a group of hapless space bounty hunters. Says Stoff, “When I met with them in Japan, one of the first things that I brought up was the experience that we had on A Scanner Darkly, and how hard we worked to remain faithful to Philip K. Dick, and that was our big concern here.”

DJ Caruso talks about the Y: The Last Man movie.

Peter Berg will direct, and is developing Hercules: The Thracian Wars with Spyglass Entertainment, Film 44, and Radical Pictures. Ryan Condal is writing the script based on Steve Moore’s five issue comic.

Warner Brothers is developing, and Bryan Singer is signed on to produce, superhero movie Capeshooters. Based on Rob Liefeld’s upcoming graphic novel, it’s about two slackers who shoot videos of superheroes, and end up running when they get evidence that a legendary hero is actually a villain. J.P. Lavin and Chad Damiani will write the script.

Xingu Films have the rights to Pat Mills and Clint Langley’s upcoming graphic novel American Reaper. In the future, special agents, called Reapers, track down and terminate criminals and terrorists that are guilty of an extreme type of identity theft where the victims mind is wiped and replaced with someone else’s. Right now the only thing known is that the film will have a targeted budget of about $50 million.

David S. Goyer on Super Max: "The studio really likes the script. Green Arrow seems to be one of the characters in the wake of this phenomenal summer ... book-ended by Iron Man and The Dark Knight. I know that Warner Brothers, Green Arrow is one of the characters that they're really interested in [and] seem to be interested in moving forward with next. It started out as a supervillain-escape idea, and the idea was, well, we can either go Marvel or DC. And I talked to both of them, and I kind of said, 'Well, who can you give me?' Because I needed a superhero that I can bounce off of. And I don't know. For my money it was, if we went Marvel, it would be Captain America. If we went DC, maybe Green Arrow. And Green Arrow seemed like the best fit.”

Unique Features and Warner Brothers will produce an adaptation of the first book in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. If successful, the other two books should follow.

David S. Goyer on The Invisible Man: “It sort of starts kind of, like, about two months after the events of the H.G. Wells book finish. And the H.G. Wells book kind of ends with, you know, the original invisible man, Griffin, has these three notebooks that all of his secrets are in, and at the end of the H.G. Wells story, you establish that they're still in existence. But ... nobody knows where they are. And my story begins with those three notebooks falling into the hands of someone else, and it takes off from there. It's more sprawling, because it's ... big. It's got elements of horror, but it's sort of a big, epic adventure movie. Part of it takes place in England; part of it takes place in Persia; part of it takes place in Siberia. ... And I added a couple, I think, wrinkles to the notion of invisibility that nobody's managed to do before. So it kind of takes it to an extreme level.” … “I've been reading a lot of Kipling, a lot of steampunk, ... trying not to go in the sort of movie-League of Extraordinary Gentlemen place [laughs]. But ... there are a lot of real historical figures that are woven in among it. ... And I think I've come up with some pretty cool things in it that I know haven't been on film before, so we'll see." The movie would be a period piece taking place a couple of months after the death of Queen Victoria.

Brett Ratner will direct MGM’s God of War game movie.

Legendary Pictures will co-produce and co-finance the Gears of War movie.