From World War II stories to zombie apocalypses (apocolypsi?), the Ninja Assassin screenwriting team of J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Sand told Collider recently that they are going to show up in pretty much every opening credit sequence you're going to see between now and 2012.
What we may not see come to come to fruition, however, is the not-so-hotly anticipated Silver Surfer film, which seems to have been tossed into the gutter after Fantastic Four 2: Electric Boogaloo fizzled at the box office. Straczynski’s script is kicking around but hopes are not high despite rumors of a Fantastic Four reboot. Hey, if there can be two Hulk movies made within five years of one another, why can’t the Fantastic Four get their second chance, eh? Regardless, if Fox doesn’t keep using the property the rights will revert back to Disney, who I’m sure you remember recently made a lot of Marvel stock holders very happy. So something will be done with them soon, but the future of the Silver Surfer isn’t bright.
Good news for Timur Bekmambetov fans out of the interview though. Sands has completed several drafts of Bekmambetov’s next piece Red Star, saying “It’s a giant sci-fi project based upon a graphic novel by Christian Gossett.” Being a sci-fi geek, I’m already psyched for this one, though no more details than “It’s been written” have surfaced.
There’s a lot of negativity flying around about Ninja Assassin, but Straczynski and Sands each seem to have a pretty good handle on where their next paychecks are coming from. Despite all the bad press, the potential in their upcoming work is too great to just throw them aside. That’d be like throwing Orci and Kurtzman to the dogs after Transformers 2, when people seem to forget they also gave us Star Trek.
