Director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Eastbound & Down) might not be the first person you would expect to be pushing to get an adaptation of an ultra-violent Garth Ennis comic up on the big screen, but nonetheless the comedy veteran has been involved in putting together a film version of the creator’s anti-superhero yarn “The Boys” for quite a while now. For the longest time the director was set to put the project together for Columbia Pictures, but those plans hit a snag in February when the studio suddenly dropped it.
Nonetheless, the director assured us that the film was not necessarily dead, and that he had multiple studios chomping at the bit to come on board and see that development of the property continued. Though, in the process of kicking the project around from place to place, it had unfortunately gone from being a faithfully hard-R recreation of Ennis’ work, to one that would have to be PG-13. Or, as McKay put it, “It’s now PG-13. But I found cool ways to keep it edgy. Nolan does so much with that rating. I want this movie to have the conceptual floor of MIB: the police for the superheroes, with the bad ass action groove of The Matrix or Oldboy.”
Whether fans are going to be down for a PG-13 version of The Boys or not, it would seem that McKay’s continued efforts have not been in vein, because he now says that one of those possible studios has bit, and work on the film is continuing. When recently asked about the status of the project by a fan on Twitter, McKay responded by saying, “Actually paramount picked it up and we’re still developing.”
For those of us who don’t follow comics closely enough to know all of the creator-owned stuff out there, “The Boys” is a long-running series written by Ennis and drawn by Darick Robertson that details the adventures of a CIA-backed team of badasses who were brought together to take down and take out superheroes when they get out of line. The comic turns the whole superhero genre on its head by portraying the nighttime vigilantes as cocky celebrities who are out of control, and the gruff military types who try to curtail their efforts as the (relative) good guys.
Though he doesn’t have much experience with action or effects work on his resume, it sounds like The Boys contains enough satire and genre commentary that McKay’s comedy experience will come in handy while adapting the material. What do you think? Does this sound like a project that was worthy of Paramount keeping alive, or is it one of those things that’s just too twisted to ever get a proper treatment in the studio system? [Spinoff Online, via Comic Book Movie]