Every few years, some bit of news surfaces that makes it seem like Hollywood is finally ready to get into the bland, saccharine cookie-cutter lives of Archie Andrews and his gang of friends. And I say this as someone whose childhood was half-spent vicariously living in Riverdale through the plethora of digests found at cash register magazine racks.
But now Warner Bros. Pictures has finished some key negotiations to bring a live-action Archie Comics movie to the big screen, Deadline reports, and have hired Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore to helm - which gives this immediate potential. But there’s an interesting possible twist on this one.
The screenplay will be written by comic scribe Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also wrote the upcoming Carrie remake. Aguirre-Sacasa’s next project happens to be the comic series Afterlife With Archie, which throws the gang into the zombie genre, and is actually one of the more interesting sounding titles in a pop culture landscape obsessed with the undead. The Deadline story speculates that zombies will play a part in the big screen undertaking, but there’s no confirmation of this one way or the other. As it stands, the basic premise for the project is just, “a high school comedy based on the original line of Archie Comics set in present day Riverdale.”
Aguirre-Sacasa also wrote a handful of episodes of Fox’s Glee, as well as an Archie Meets Glee comic miniseries. So when you take into account Moore’s background in musical theater direction, combined with his only feature being part musical, I don’t understand why Deadline assumes this thing will go zombie and not musical.
Either way it goes, I’m definitely buying the Jughead crown tie-in.
