Comic Book Icon Set to Write ‘Excalibur’
Posted by Dr. Cole Abaius (cole.abaius@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 28, 2009
For the record, I resisted the urge to make a pun about Warren Ellis pulling the script for Excalibur out of a stone. Although it’s a possibility. The comic icon and trans-humanism enthusiast is setting pen to paper in a different way, currently scripting out a project for Hollywood Gang – the fine folks that co-brought you 300.
Ellis seemed anxious to get the news off his chest, but apparently no one was clever enough to interview it out of him at Comic-Con. According to his own website, it’s still in the treatment phase, and Ellis links to the wiki page for the 1981 film of the same name, presumably because his project will also be a retelling of the King Arthur story. I doubt we’re going into remake territory here outright, but there will no doubt be common elements to both. Strange how that works for a more-than-likely fictional person who never existed. Or did he? He didn’t.
The only other story point that’s come out about the project comes from Aint It Cool, where Ellis claims that it will focus on the “gathering of the knights” instead of the usual Arthur-story.
As we all know, Arthur has been in film many times before, perhaps most personally notably in The Sword in the Stone which has an awesome scene in which Merlin battles an evil witch and defeats her by turning into a virus. That has absolutely nothing to do with this news, but it should. Email Warren Ellis and convince him to include a similar scene.
In other news, Ellis is one of the very, very, very few human beings I can stand on twitter. I urge you to follow him because he’s usually ridiculously hilarious.
In other, other news, we already reported a bit back where Summit has optioned Ellis’s “Red” for an adaptation, so it looks like he may just be sliding his way into Hollywood one project at a time.
What do you think?
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