Paramount Turning Insurrection Comic Into Sci-Fi Spartacus Film
The Starz network kind of came out of nowhere a few years back and established itself as a serious player in the TV landscape thanks to Steven S. DeKnight’s always bloody, often brilliant Spartacus: Blood and Sand. We all know that Hollywood loves nothing more than to jump aboard a bandwagon, so we’ve seen a couple of projects trying to capture the same magic as the show. Now a new Paramount movie seeks to answer the unasked question of “How do you make Spartacus more awesome?” The answer: swap out Rome for a sci-fi dystopia and gladiators for corporate-bred clone soldiers, naturally.
That’s the general premise behind Insurrection, a Boom! Studios comic series that Paramount is in the midst of acquiring the rights to. Paramount and producers Michael De Luca and Matt Tolmach are keen to turn Insurrection into a big-screen sci-fi epic, with comic writer Blake Masters on board to handle the movie adaptation himself.
The Insurrection comic, which debuted last year, is set in a future where corporations are people…er, where corporations are “more powerful than governments.” (Wow, that’s pretty far fetched, don’t you think?) At any rate, when these megacorps can’t settle their problems inside the boardroom, they rely on their own private armies, armies made up of clones bred specifically for this purpose. As you might expect, these clone soldiers don’t exactly get treated well or respected, so sure enough, eventually one of them decides he’s mad as hell and he isn’t gonna take it anymore. Boom, clone revolution.
It’s always nice to see a creator get the chance to take a stab at adapting his own work for the screen, but Masters isn’t exactly an unknown in Tinseltown. He created the excellent Showtime series Brotherhood back in 2006 and has since worked on shows such as Law & Order: LA. He created Insurrection after meeting the folks at Boom! Studios while writing a script based on their 2 Guns comic. Now he’s come full circle back to Hollywood with it, and the snake just keeps on swallowing its tail…
