Twentieth Century and Hulu are currently developing a new film adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s classic graphic novel series The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The series tells the adventures of a group of adventurers made of characters from Victorian literature who ban together to stop various threats to the world. Moore and O’Neill’s Victorian world was one where all literary characters lived and intermingled, so the original team consisted of characters from King Solomon’s Mines, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, The Invisible Man and more. The series ran for five volumes plus three additional spinoff books detailing further adventures of Captain Nemo’s daughter.
Revolutionary Road and Red Sparrow screenwriter Justin Haythe is currently working on the script for this new iteration, which is currently pigeonholed to premier on the Hulu steaming service.
The previous attempt to bring Moore and O’Neill’s series of graphic novels resulted in the rather dire 2003 film wihich starred Sean Connery as the League’s leader, Alan Quartermain. It sported a screenplay that took some broad liberties with the source material’s storylines and, in an obvious move to give American audiences some literary representation, it added an adult version of Tom Sawyer. Fans, critics and general audiences all pretty much hated the film, and it is “credited” with being the film that drove Connery into retirement.
Some will no doubt question why remake this movie when it was terrible to begin with. That, actually, would point to the best reason to try another adaptation, giving the material a better chance to earn its due. And Twentieth Century Studios, when it was still known as Twentieth Century Fox, had taken a couple of runs at a reboot before without apparently cracking the codet as to how to adapt it successfully. In 2013, the studio was looking at turning the property into a television series, but by 2015, the intent had changed to a feature film.
Via Hollywood Reporter.
