In case you haven’t noticed, there are quite a lot of filmmakers who have been finding themselves gravitating towards comic book movies. In recent years, the genre has attracted both writers and directors who have been doing impressive work, be it the team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, James Wan, Ryan Coogler, or Doug Liman. It makes one wonder who will be next to join that particular side of the feature world… but you probably shouldn’t expect the duo of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to be on that list. Not only are they happy with the comic book adaptations they’re currently developing on television, but they don’t really want to deal with all the strings that come attached with doing a big franchise film.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg only recently traveled into the world of live-action sequels with the upcoming Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (which they took part in co-writing), and it was with that in mind that I asked Rogen about the potential of them doing a big screen comic book franchise movie when I sat down with him during a recent press day in Los Angeles. The actor/writer/director/producer didn’t exactly leap at the suggestion, and instead noted that he and his writing partner prefer to work with a certain degree of freedom that wouldn’t be provided. Said Rogen,
Preacher… that’s the perfect version of it for us, in that it’s a comic book that we love, but there was very few infrastructural strings attached to it, I guess I would say. We’re all for having creative partners, but it seems like the way a lot of those movies are structured… they’re very producer driven projects and we generally like to be the producers who are driving the projects, so that’s what we’ve found a way to do. The Boys too, we’re working on that now as well.
Going further, Seth Rogen also explained that it was one of the lessons that he and Evan Goldberg took away from the making of Green Hornet a few years ago, really narrowing the whole idea down to two simple points:
That’s what Green Hornet taught us, honestly, was to find a way to do comic books that a) play to the strengths of our sensibilities and b) do not have a lot of kind of strings attached to them as far as kind of overlords. And that’s just like because we also like to push things in a way that that generally people are not cool with [laughter] It’s probably our fault.
So instead of enlisting with either Marvel Studios or the folks over at Warner Bros./DC, it looks like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are much happier adapting Vertigo comics like Preacher and The Boys on television. Perhaps they can even expand that idea further. I’m totally game form them to start developing an adaptation of Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan.
Fans of Seth Rogen and comic books will soon see the two worlds collide with the debut of Preacher on AMC starting Sunday May 22nd, but if you’re more interested in seeing Rogen on the screen and being funny, you’ll be able to check Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising in theaters this Friday, May 20th.
