Back in November, it was announced that Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s studio Plan B had bought the film rights to an in-progress graphic novel created by Paul Pope. The book’s still not out yet, but now comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that Alex Tse, the writer who managed to get so much right in Watchmen, will be adapting Battling Boy for the big screen.
I really wish I knew more about this GN because the premise does sound a little intriguing. Quoth Pope at his publisher First Second Books’s website:
Battling Boy is the son of a god or a super hero—it is left unspecified—who comes down from the top of a mountain (or rather, from inside a cloud/UFO contraption/contrivance from above a mountain top) at this father’s behest, in order to rid a giant city from it’s plague of monsters. Hercules had his labors, Batman has his Gotham, Battling Boy has his Monstropolis.
Well sure… entire epics have come from slimmer loglines, right?
But I still can’t help but feel as if better GNs that are just as well-drawn and actually have been released would make better movies, such as Mark Smylie’s Artesia series, about a woman who was both the concubine of a king and his greatest general, who survived his treacherous attempted slaughter to overtake his kingdom and lead it to glory against a darker, more evil threat to their known world.
Now isn’t that a much better logline and wouldn’t that make a much better movie?
The Battling Boy GN will be released onto bookshelves in 2010; there’s no date yet for the movie version.
Related Post: Paul Pope’s Battling Boy optioned
Laur says:
Oh, I’ve never heard of Artesia. Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll be checking this one out now.
Trisha Lynn says:
@Laur: It was totally my pleasure, because Mark’s one of my favorite comics creators.
Gordon McAlpin says:
Well, I think Battling Boy sounds like an awesome action movie waiting to happen. 😛
Trisha Lynn says:
@Gordon: You are totally right about that, but I think an Artesia movie would also be an awesome action movie because it’s like Xena on steroids.