After the smash big-screen success of Rob Liefeld‘s comic book creation Deadpool, Hollywood has been looking to see what other Liefeld creations should make the vault to the big screen. Coming up next on the docket? Prophet, about a vulnerable, transient man named John Prophet who undergoes various medical experiments and becomes a tortured supersoldier in the process (think Captain America with PTSD). Studio 8 (White Boy Rick) acquired the screen rights in 2018, and Marc Guggenheim (Arrow) was attached to write the screenplay two years later.
Now, in an exclusive interview with our very own Coy Jandreau, Liefeld has updated us on the screen life of Prophet and Guggenheim’s work so far. And he is… excited!
“Prophet is in great shape, we have Marc Guggenheim writing the screenplay. There were a number of writers vying for the job to write the screenplay, and I knew when I met with Marc that he was the guy. Studio 8 was really excited to fit into his schedule — he’s very in demand — and we had a couple conversations, and I’m like, ‘Wow, Marc really gets it, he’s the right guy, I’m honored that he’s even interested.’ He expressed that he was a fan back in the day. I’ve known Marc for about a decade; I was a fan of his comic books that he was writing prior to him taking over the CW Arrow show… He had a great, very, very, I cannot tell you how true and reflective of the comic book what he’s doing [is], but he’s [also] bringing a fresh, Guggenheim kind of couple new little twists in there that are great. So that’s onboard. If that first draft is great, I guess we’ll find a bubble to shoot it in.”
When our own Christina Radish spoke with Guggenheim about the Prophet script, he also spoke toward the project’s dual goals of character reverence and originality: “How do you be original, and how do you not make it feel derivative? That way that I tend to look at superhero movies, both as a writer and as a viewer and audience member is that I now think of superheroes as its own sub-genre. You can do a superhero movie that feels like a Western, or you can do a superhero movie that feels like a horror movie. If you approach it with that in mind, you can avoid things that have become cliche.”
via Collider