For The Love of Comics

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I found out about this article in the Hollywood Reporter via a post on Ed Brubaker’s blog today and have since seen it spread all over the place. I refuse to continue the cliche of saying Sleeper is being “woken up”. It’s almost as lame as all of the “Holy Unoriginality, Batman!” tripe that goes around.

Anyway, in case you’ve been skipping the blogs and interwebs all day and I have the honor of being the first thing you read today, Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise are apparently trying to set up a film adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper series at Warner Brothers, with Cruise “loosely attached” to star. With luck, someone else won’t already have the rights and Warner Brothers will actually be able to release the movie, should it actually be made. The general caveats apply, of course. Buying options to or “setting up” adaptations does not necessarily mean that the film will be made and Cruise may not actually star, but having the names of Raimi and Cruise attached definitely don’t hurt the odds of seeing Sleeper in theaters.

Brubaker mentions this in his blog post, but it bears repeating that Hollywood Reporter got one thing wrong - Sleeper is not a spin-off of either WildC.A.T.S. or Gen13, it merely features some characters that also appear in those series.

Finally, I have no idea why the sentence “Sleeper sees Raimi and Donen continuing their company’s superhero, which began when they recently set up the superhero story “The Transplants” at Disney.” made it past the copyeditors.

Technorati Tags: Ed Brubaker, Sleeper, Sam Raimi, Tom Cruise, Warner Brothers, Movies

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In case you haven’t read it on one of the ten other places that I have, Sam Raimi has told Sci-Fi Wire that he’s waiting until he reads James Vanderbilt’s script for Spider-Man 4 to decide whether or not he will direct.

“Right now James Vanderbilt is writing the script, and he’s working on it, and I’m excited to read it,” Raimi said in a group interview in Century City, Calif., on June 5. “I think it’s going to be done in a few months. I’m hoping it’s as great as our discussions were about it and hoping it feels right for me, because I love Spider-Man, and I’m hoping I’m well-enough rested to, like, really embrace it and hoping that Sony wants me at that time to direct it. So if all those things come together, I would love, love to do it. But this is a lot of unknowns about the future.”

Raimi also weighed in on recasting rumors.

“Well, I hate to recast anybody in the picture,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine that. It’s like the new Darren [who was recast during the run of the 1960s TV series Bewitched]. Whenever that happened. So I don’t know. I can’t imagine that.”

I may be in the minority here, but I really would like to see the same team throughout the Spider-saga if at all possible. I’m willing to forgive the whole Emo Spider fiasco, if they can return to the previous level of quality.

Technorati Tags: Spider-Man, Sam Raimi, James Vanderbilt, Peter Parker, Mary Jane

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Comics Should Be Good! has a guest interview by Rohan Williams with Sam Raimi and his partner in Ghost House Pictures production studio, Rob Tapert.

They briefly discuss how they came to produce 30 Days of Night, but it looks like the meaty parts of that subject will be in the upcoming second part of the interview.

The interesting part (to me) concerned Raimi’s future role and opinions regarding the Spider-man movie franchise:

Do you have any inclination yet towards whether you’d like to produce or direct the next Spider-Man movie, or is too early to call?

Sam: I think that’s going to be up to Sony Pictures, and I think that it’s too early for them to say, actually. But currently I’m working on… well, not now, but as soon as the writers strike’s over… I’m going to begin working with a writer on the screenplay.

Is it important to you that the story follows on from the first three? I mean, how important is internal continuity to you? Can you go Evil Dead-style and change details a little bit, maybe change the story up a little bit?

Sam: If I was writing it I would have a very strong opinion about that, but we’re hiring a writer to come up with his own take. Sony was willing to go either way, we’ll just have to wait and see what the writer comes up with. I think anything’s possible, though.

I mean, there’s been so many different versions, it doesn’t have to follow the movies that we’ve made. I’d very much like to see Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, so I have a personal interest in that, but certainly anything’s possible. Spider-Man’s such a big character in the comic books that he could endure a lot of different interpretations. You could start over or you could start with a different aspect of the story than I’ve focused on in the pictures I’ve made, we’ll just have to wait and see what the writer comes up with.

Do you think the story will still be interesting if Spider-Man moves on and gets married? Because within the world of comics, a lot of writers complain that once he got married the stories weren’t as interesting, and the movies seem to be heading towards that. As someone who’s a married man and has a family, what do you think of this idea that he can’t be interesting once he’s married?

Sam: He’s most powerful to me as an adolescent. The thing that Stan Lee created that was so special was that he was a very young character, and he’s a kid trying to deal with these fantastic powers. The idea of being married counters that a little bit. It’s a place of accepted responsibility versus being on the road to learning responsibility. It’s associated with adulthood versus being the ultimate kid who’s a superhero. So it’s not that you couldn’t tell a good story with a married Spider-Man, but my favorite Spider-Man is the unmarried one.

Far from a commitment to the next movie, but it sounds like he’s leaning towards coming back.

Raimi also stated that it will be left up to the writer to decide what villains will appear in Spiderman 4

Go check out Comics Should Be Good! to read the full interview.

tag: 30 Days of Night, Ghost House Pictures, Rob Tapert, Rohan Williams, Sam Raimi, Spiderman, Spider-Man, Spider-man 4

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