Home Entertainment Chris Pratt to star in comic-book adaptation COWBOY NINJA VIKING

Chris Pratt to star in comic-book adaptation COWBOY NINJA VIKING

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And the Chris-mas continues! (Yes, I’m just going to keep using that term until it sticks). Chris Pratt’s meteoric ascension from a schlubby layabout on Parks & Rec to this generation’s Han Solo in Guardians of the Galaxy has been nothing short of spectacular. With him also playing the voice of heroic brickster Emmet in The LEGO Movie franchise as well as being the dino-wrangling lead in Jurassic World, his leading man street cred couldn’t be higher. So now he’s going to try his hand at being a leading men. No, that wasn’t a typo.

ChrisPratt_CowboyNinjaViking

According to Collider, Pratt has signed to star in Universal’s long gestating comic book adaptation Cowboy Ninja Viking. Created by writer A.J. Lieberman and artist Riley Rossmo, the Image Comics series follows Duncan, a member of an experimental counter-intelligence unit staffed exclusively by Multiple Personality Disorder patients who have been transformed past-life regression, psychotropic drugs and aggressive psychotherapy into special agents known as Triplets. Essentially, these Triplets each possess three distinctly different personalities, each of which brings a different skill/expertise that is handy for whatever missions the unit has to perform. After the unit falls apart due to their degrading mental state, the Triplets are turned into killers for hire. In Duncan’s case, his three personalities take on the identities of – yep, you guessed it – a cowboy, a ninja and a viking, all of whose skills he uses to try to track down billionaire that created the program in the first place.

The film’s initial script from Zombieland scribes Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese has been bouncing around Hollywood for years now with Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z) attached to direct at one stage, although he’s since moved on with no replacement as of yet. According to Collider, the latest draft of the script has Duncan’s individual personalities manifesting as different people, though he still looks the same to onlookers. In other words, Pratt could play Duncan, while other actors would play the titular Cowboy, Ninja and Viking.

That could certainly work, and make for a unique spin on things (although I have no idea how that would work for the other Triplets), but personally I would love to see Pratt work his magic on all the roles. It could be that we get some kind of middle ground though, where Duncan “hands over control”, so to speak, to the different personalities when needed, but in the end is required to combine them all into a singular personality, armed with all of their respective skills simultaneously.

Whatever happens, I’m sure that now that Pratt, the current Hollywood golden boy, is attached, we will probably see some major momentum on this. Pratt has proven affably that he can lead an unproven franchise to success and handle all the dramatic and comedic heavy lifting with ease, so we can probably expect a director to jump onto this gig before too long, so that they can also bask in the Chris-mas spririt.

Last Updated: November 20, 2014

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