JT Petty Bringing ZOMBIES VERSUS ROBOTS To The Big Screen!
The worlds of Ashley Wood are inherently unfilmable. Or, at least, that has long been my opinion. Not because I don't love Wood and his work - I do, I have several large format hardcover collections of his stuff around ScreenAnarchy HQ - but because they are big, sprawling, hyper violent and often hyper-sexualized worlds that are much more about mood and tone and techno-fetish than about story. Just plain regular fetish, too, given the sheer volume of voluptuous nudity included in most Wood titles. Would is ultimate auteur of the scifi geek comic crowd, basically, and matching what he does on the page on screen will be enormously expensive - very likely so much so that raising the budget needed would require stripping out many of the elements that make Wood so unique and compelling in the first place.
That hasn't stopped people from trying. There's been talk of a film version of Popbot for a few years now. Yeah, good luck getting a two hundred million dollar movie about a punk rock singing pussycat (literally) and his robot companion off the ground. 'Cause that's what you're looking at there. But someone's got a Wood project off the ground now and, good lord, I've got an awful lot of faith both in the writer and in the viability of the project he chose to adapt.
The project is Zombies Versus Robots and of all Wood's material - with the possible exception of World War Robot, currently being developed by Jerry Bruckheimer - this is the one that probably has the clearest path to the screen thanks to its relatively clear and straightforward story. It's the story of a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world, basically. A young girl with a horde of hungry zombies outside her underground lair who want to ear her and a swarm of military robots down there with her who want to protect her. And using this as the basis for a script titled Inherit The Earth is S&MAN and The Burrowers director JT Petty - a man who is not only very geek-savvy but also a very, very smart writer.
The report at Deadline announcing the project does not list Petty as directing - it mentions only the writing gig - but you have to assume he's first in line. The worrying bit of that story is that while picking the project up Sony brought Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes along for the ride. Bay's got the technical chops to make this work, no doubt about that, but while a Petty version of this could be bang on a Bay version would be the antithesis of pretty much every image Wood has ever drawn. Yeah, Bay likes his robots and busty women, too, but he's also very clean and tidy about things which Wood very definitely is not.
Please don't fuck this up, Sony. Please.
That hasn't stopped people from trying. There's been talk of a film version of Popbot for a few years now. Yeah, good luck getting a two hundred million dollar movie about a punk rock singing pussycat (literally) and his robot companion off the ground. 'Cause that's what you're looking at there. But someone's got a Wood project off the ground now and, good lord, I've got an awful lot of faith both in the writer and in the viability of the project he chose to adapt.
The project is Zombies Versus Robots and of all Wood's material - with the possible exception of World War Robot, currently being developed by Jerry Bruckheimer - this is the one that probably has the clearest path to the screen thanks to its relatively clear and straightforward story. It's the story of a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world, basically. A young girl with a horde of hungry zombies outside her underground lair who want to ear her and a swarm of military robots down there with her who want to protect her. And using this as the basis for a script titled Inherit The Earth is S&MAN and The Burrowers director JT Petty - a man who is not only very geek-savvy but also a very, very smart writer.
The report at Deadline announcing the project does not list Petty as directing - it mentions only the writing gig - but you have to assume he's first in line. The worrying bit of that story is that while picking the project up Sony brought Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes along for the ride. Bay's got the technical chops to make this work, no doubt about that, but while a Petty version of this could be bang on a Bay version would be the antithesis of pretty much every image Wood has ever drawn. Yeah, Bay likes his robots and busty women, too, but he's also very clean and tidy about things which Wood very definitely is not.
Please don't fuck this up, Sony. Please.
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