Veronica Mars Creator Rob Thomas Opens Up About iZombie Pilot

Earlier this week, we reported that The CW had ordered a pilot from executive producers Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero based on the Vertigo comic book series iZombie from Chris Roberson and Mike Allred. At the time, as before, Thomas hadn't spoken out on the series just yet--but in a note to his Veronica Mars Kickstarter supporter, Thomas has piped up about the project, giving a small but promising update on the project's status and saying that they've already started the process of location scouting, casting and the like. "You might have also seen an announcement earlier this week that the CW has ordered a pilot episode of a new show I've been developing called iZombie, which is based on an excellent series of comics from Vertigo," Thomas wrote. "I wrote the pilot with Diane Ruggiero, who was a writer on Veronica Mars and my co-writer on the screenplay for the movie, and I've tricked my long-time producing partners, Dan Etheridge and Danielle Stokdyk, into overseeing yet another project with me.

"I should point out that a 'pilot order' is exactly that: the CW liked our script, and gave us the go-ahead to produce a pilot episode for the series. This is a good development, but it's still not a guarantee that we'll end up on television. Each year, the networks commission up to a dozen new pilots, but only a few of them receive a series order. So while I'm excited, this doesn't mean that I've got a new television series... yet. "What it does mean is that I'll no longer be able to take a few days off when we finish work on Veronica Mars and lock it down next week, since we've already started working on casting, locations, and a million other details that need to be worked out in order to produce the pilot. We'll begin shooting in late March, probably just days after the movie is released in theaters." That's a fair amount of information, but it's all we've got. So far no real clue as to who might be cast, where they'll be shooting or whether the pilot will make it out into the world if it doesn't get picked up to series.