A lot has been said over the last couple weeks about how Fox is losing their film rights to comic book superhero Daredevil to Marvel Studios. And while character rights reverting back to their creators is a good thing, the downside of all of this is that fan favourite director Joe Carnahan’s gritty 70’s reboot of the character had its legs kicked out from under it.
But while it looks like Carnahan has missed his shot at one gritty superhero, he’s about about to get a shot at another. Except, while this one may be super, he’s most definitely not heroic.
A while back Carnahan’s name was floating around as a possibility for directing an adaption of superstar comic-book writer Mark “Kick-Ass” Millar’s dark villain story, Nemesis. Now Millar has revealed over on the MillarWorld forums that not only did Carnahan get the directing gig, but he will be writing the script as well.
“Shot straight from a wedding in Manchester last week to the City of Angels and plunged straight into some studio biz on the Nemesis movie. Mighty Joe Carnahan is directing (from a script by he and his brother Matthew), but this much you already know. Fox wanted us to get in the same room for the first time and really hash this out, which was exciting. Joe has a really brilliant take on this and Matt and he are going to take things from here so I’m really happy. Absolutely no casting has been done formally although you can google the MTV interview from last January where he and Sir Liam Neeson are chatting about it. More news as it happens.”\
Could this sudden confirmation perhaps have anything to do with those two awesome sizzle reels that Carnahan produced for his failed Daredevil pitch? They had a pretty dark and violent tone and that’s exactly what’s going to be required for Nemesis. For those of you not familiar with the character, he had his own series in 2010 under the Marvel creator-owned ICON imprint, as well running in Millar’s own CLiNT magazine. The basic premise behind the character was from an idea Millar had that posited what if Batman was also the Joker? Nemesis is the smartest man on the planet, and using his fortune has trained and perfected his mind, body and methods to the peak of human possibility. He just so happens to also be batshit insane, so he uses all those abilities to reign down death and destruction on the entire USA for his own mysterious reasons, and the only person who can stop him is police chief Blake Morrow.
We’ve yet to have a comic book movie told from the point of view of the supervillain, so this should make for a very interesting twist. We’ve already seen with Kick-Ass that both studios and audiences were not going to be put off by some of Millar’s more, shall we say unconventional ideas, so it bodes well that this will get a decent adaptation.
Last Updated: August 21, 2012
