With Avengers: Endgame toppling Avatar‘s all time box office record, it’s proof that the film going public love their comic book adaptations. Following on from our earlier piece, here’s five more comic runs that could help feed that appetite.
Star Wars: Darth Vader (Marvel)
The elevator pitch: What did Vader do before having issues with his kids rebelling? Well, the simple answer is to try survive both the machinations of his dark master, and the jockeying for position in an intrigue-riddled Empire.
The box office failure of Solo: A Star Wars story dropped a number of Star Wars projects expanding popular character lore into carbonite. What better way than to kickstart that again than this 2017 Marvel run. Not only did this remind us once more that Vader is a stone-cold bad-arse cyborg space wizard (and not some whiny git with a phobia of sand), but it also introduced us to the wonder that is Doctor Aphra. So a film from this run could do double duty: come for an arse-kicking Dark Lord of the Sith in his force-wielding heyday, but stay for the introduction (and backdoor pilot) of the most roguish archaeologist in a galaxy far, far, away.
Queen and Country (Oni)
The elevator pitch: A gritty, realistic spy thriller with a female lead.
Tara Chace ain’t Bond. Sure she’s as competent as 007, but doesn’t drink martinis or fight in volcanic secret liars. Instead she swills booze straight from the bottle, and as a member of the British Special Operations Section does what ever she must to keep Queen and Country protected from both foreign and domestic enemies. Greg Rucka’s take on the spy genre is much more le Carre than Fleming, and as much as I enjoy La Femme Nikita and Atomic Blonde, I’d love to something harsher, and with more substance. Queen and Country could certainly fill that role.
[Ridley Scott seems to be attached, but he’s attached to everything sooner or later – Ed.]
Proof (Image)
The elevator pitch: Imagine what The X-Files would be like if Fox Mulder was Bigfoot.
With the disaster of both Hellboy and the attempted revitalisation of The X-Files, the way could be open for this odd hybrid. John “Proof” Prufrock and Ginger Brown (our human POV character) are agents of the American government, working for the shadowy organisation known as The Lodge. They are charged with keeping the world safe from cryptids, as well as cryptids safe from the world. The resulting comics are a giant nerdish tilt into crypto-zoology, and the chance to see such iconic creatures as the chupacabra, thunderbirds or jackalopes on the big screen…well that’s just seems like too good an opportunity to miss.
Booster Gold (DC)
The elevator pitch: An Average Joe from 25th century is sick of his screwed up life, so he steals a time machine to travel to the present day and become a superhero. There he finds a kindred spirit, in the form of another hero struggling to live up to his reputation: the Blue Beetle.
This one’s a no brainer. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle is the quintessential error-prone superheroic buddy comedy bromance. It’d bring some much needed levity into the DCCU and cement the step in the right direction taken by Shazam. There’s also some genuine pathos in this story, between Booster’s low self-esteem (and vast over-compensation) and Ted Kord’s eventual fate.
In fact, this is one that should already be in the works, with it being announced in 2016, and a script having been reputedly finished this year. No announcement as yet on casting, so it could be a very long time till we do actually see the Blue and the Gold together on the big screen.
Lazarus (Image)
The elevator pitch: In a world fallen to corporate feudalism Forever Carlyle is the sword and shield of the powerful Carlyle family, a Lazarus. Yet the powerful warrior is having doubts about her life and purpose.
Greg Rucka combines a Shakespearean tale of dynastic intrigue, with a cyberpunk setting, to produce something wholly unique and compelling. This is a rich tale of discovery and betrayal, as a strange multi-layered near future unfolds for the readers. In film form this would produce some startling action and allow for a deadly ballet, as the enhanced Lazarus unleash the carnage they were built for, but would also have the solid narrative structure to support it.
