Here it is only Tuesday, and I think that this may be the best news story of the week short of George Lucas apologizing for the Star Wars “Special Editions” and announcing that he will make only the original theatrical cuts of the films available for the rest of time. Director Barry Sonnenfeld and comic book writer Grant Morrison are teaming up for Dominion: Dinosaurs Versus Aliens.
According to Deadline, the project will start as a graphic novel to be published by Liquid Comics later this year and then be turned into a feature film. Morrison is set to write both the comic and the film’s screenplay with Sonnenfeld set to produce and direct.
The story revolves around an invasion of prehistoric Earth by aliens who encounter resistance from dinosaurs showing a level of intelligence that modern science doesn’t suspect them having. Does this mean that the film will be entirely without dialogue? That would certainly be an interesting way to go, and one that makes me very hopeful that this all comes to pass.
I’ve a fan of Morrison’s writing for over two decades, ever since my college friend Eric shoved an early issue of his Doom Patrol run into my hands. Between his outrageous and absurdist take on the classic DC Comics characters and his humanist and deconstructionist take on Animal Man, I was hooked. Normally more of a DC, his run on Uncanny X-Men marked only one of two times that I actively followed a writer’s run on a Marvel mutant book. (The other was Joss Whedon.) As part of the British Writers Invasion of comics in the 1980s, Morrison has penned a number of groundbreaking works including the aforementioned titles as well as The Invisibles and All-Star Superman. And even when something he writes doesn’t quite succeed, it is still an interesting failure. Morrison hasn’t done much film work. He did write a screenplay adaptation of his comic miniseries We3 which was praised by anyone who had read it (myself included) but which never got any traction towards becoming a film.
The pairing of Morrison and Sonnenfeld is not one I would have necessarily made off the top of my head. Still, Sonnenfeld has his own quirky viewpoint and it should be interesting to see how the two mesh on this project.
