There are few long form comic book stories that really feel like a single cohesive whole. It is just hard to maintain total continuity in style and storytelling over more than a half a decade’s worth of single issues.
Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra were able to accomplish that difficult feat with their epic series Y: The Last Man. A tale told over several years and 60 total issues, that details the last male on earth, and his pet monkey. The comic series is one of the great achievements in comic book storytelling, and is ripe for an adaptation.
The problem is that such an large tale needs more than two hours to tell, and that has slowed the adaptation process down considerably. New Line has been reluctant to sign off on a trilogy of films, but they are still very eager to move forward with a single Y: The Last Man film.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that New Line has brought in two new writers to take a new stab at the adaptation:
Writing duo Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia are in final negotiations to write New Line Cinema’s adaptation of the acclaimed Vertigo comic book… The duo is somewhat new to the feature world but are hot out of the gate – Y is the second studio job in five months after booking Sony’s untitled Zorro origin project — but they have plenty of genre TV credits. Federman and Scaia were writer-producers on Charlie’s Angels, Human Target, Warehouse 13 and Jericho.
What is interesting is that these two guys have such a strong history with quality, serialized genre TV shows, which has long been considered the best adaptation home for this project. So knowing that the movie is written by guys with that type of background gives some hope that the story will be given it’s due and not crammed into tiny one off package.
C’mon New Line, remember the last time people wanted a trilogy of films from you guys?
