Movies
Columbia Pictures to Adapt ‘Preacher’ Comic Series!
Happy Halloween to me! My favorite comic book of all-time is finally back on the rails as Columbia Pictures has picked up the rights to Preacher, the popular 1990s Vertigo series, for an adaptation to be directed by Sam Mendes. I would have loved to see this as an HBO series, but at this point I’m willing to take it in any form I can. Read on for the skinny.
Neal Moritz and his Original Films banner are producing with Kickstart Prods.’ Jason Netter.
Created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, “Preacher,” which ran from 1995-2000, told the story of a down-and-out Texas preacher possessed by Genesis, a supernatural entity conceived by the unnatural coupling of an angel and a demon.
Given immense powers, the preacher teamed with an old girlfriend and a hard-drinking Irish vampire and set out on a journey across America to find God — who apparently had abandoned his duties in heaven — and hold him accountable for his negligence.
Getting a “Preacher” project off the ground has long been a favorite among the comic book literati in town, though none has been blessed to see completion. The project was previously set up as a one-hour series at HBO but was put into turnaround. Mark Steven Howard wrote a pilot which Howard Deutch was attached to direct.
A previous movie version, to have been produced by Kevin Smith’s View Askew, among others, got to the casting stage, with James Marsden attached for the title role and a reported budget of $25 million.
The new “Preacher” has no writers on board, though Mendes will lead the search while putting the finishing touches on his drama “Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and due Dec. 26.
While comic book movies might seem as common as Joker Halloween costumes, CAA-repped Mendes directed one of this century’s early comic adaptations, 2002’s “Road to Perdition.”
Moritz and Netter are working adapting another Ennis comic book, “The Boys,” which also is set up Columbia.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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