When good and bad news collide; Heat Vision reports that Dark Horse Comics property Rex Mundi, which is being produced by Johnny Depp‘s company Infinitum Nihil for Warner Bros. Pictures, has hired on a pair of writers to start fleshing out a script. For the throngs of you who probably never read the series, Rex Mundi is about the quest for the Holy Grail in 1933-era Europe. This isn’t the 1933 you’re thinking of though; in this world magic is actually real and feudalism reigns supreme, with The Catholic Church maintaining their stranglehold over the land (goodbye Protestant Reformation). This is the good news, if only because it’s a cool take on the whole “hunt for the Holy Grail” story in an interesting alternate history timeline. I’ve never read the series, but I know people who truly dug it.
But now we come to the bad news. The two writers hired for the project? Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, two of the many writers who helped pen the truly wretched Tron: Legacy. Even if you want to debate about how the soundtrack was cool and how pretty the colors were, you have to at least admit how painful the dialogue was and how the story made no actual sense. And someone wants them to write another script? The case can be made that it most likely wasn’t their fault since the two ended up with a story credit instead of screenplay credit, but anyone involved in the creation of that flick sans effects and Daft Punk instantly deflates my excitement for anything. It’s going to be a reflex for a long time.
While you wait for Rex Mundi to be adapted, and possibly ruined, the entire comic run (which started at Image Comics in 2003 and concluded at Dark Horse Comics in 2009) is available to check out, so you should do that. Reading is good, and reading with pictures to accompany it is even better.