Dirk Blackman, Howard McCain to write new script
Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain are trying to corner the market on sword-swinging fantasy adventures.
The pair hold been hired to write a new script for "Conan," as in the barbarian, for Lionsgate. And the writing team's action-adventure screenplay "Amazon," an epical about female warriors to which Scarlett Johansson has been attached, is navigation out of turnaround toward Lionsgate as well, with Neal Moritz and his Original Film banner advent on to produce erstwhile the apportion is completed.
Director searches ar under way for both.
Paradox Entertainment president of the United States and CEO Fredrik Malmberg is producing the "Conan" feature along with Boaz Davidson, Joe Gatta and Avi Lerner of Millennium Films. Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer ("Sahara") have already been functional on a separate, parallel script for the photographic film, a electric potential resurrection of the greco-Roman warrior created by Robert E. Howard in stacks of pulp stories published in the 1930s. In 1982, Oliver Stone and John Milius wrote a bloody version, which Milius also directed, that asterisked Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"We all want this motion-picture show to go into output as before long as possible," Malmberg aforesaid. "It's a fast-tracked picture. Lionsgate matte up the process was enhanced by having a second team get in and do a script."
Much like with "Batman Begins," the studio hopes to redraw the Conan feature universe to raise a modern, post-millennial franchise. So rather than remaking the Schwarzenegger bloodfest, the writers have gone back to Howard's original stories to create a $100 million R-rated origin movie, the largest production to date for Lionsgate and Millennium.
"Fans expect (these types of movies) to be more true to the source material," Malmberg said. "There's no reason thither couldn't be a Conan movie every two long time. He's nearly like Batman: He's a dark hero. He's a hard hero. He has to be badass, merely we besides have to like him."
Blackman and McCain, repped by ICM and Circle of Confusion, latterly co-wrote the science fiction actioner "Outlander," which McCain also directed. It screens Friday at the Locarno film festival. They too are credited writers on "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans," due out next year.
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