Edgar Wright Likely Heading to Disney's Kolchak The Night Stalker With Johnny Depp

Reports that ousted Ant-Man director Edgar Wright was getting along fine with Marvel but having problems with upper management at Disney may turn out to be inaccurate, as Deadline suggests that the Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World filmmaker will return to his abandoned reimagining of Kolchak, The Night Stalker for the studio. Johnny Depp is expected to play the title role of a tabloid news reporter whose crime beat always seemed to lead him into supernatural stories that made his show a kind of precursor to The X-Files. Since 2003, Moonstone has been publishing Kolchak comics, often written by their most prolific writer Dave Ulanski but also featuring work from names like Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz, who have done Spider-Girl, Legion of Super-Heroes and Superman. Here's Deadline's vision for the project, which Wright was developing in early 2012 and which seemed to get shunted to the background to make The World's End and Ant-Man:

Wright has been developing this for Johnny Depp to play the tabloid news reporter, played by Darren McGavin in the original '70s movie and series. If you don't recall it, Kolchak covered crime for a tabloid and his cases always led to supernatural perpetrators that included zombies, vampires, werewolves and aliens. Of course, neither his editor nor anyone else would believe him or allow him to run what seemed like outrageous stories, but he always got close enough to the truth that he was stalked by these great villains and found a way to dispatch them. It was playful in tone but often scary as hell at the same time. I'm told that the script by D.V. DeVincentis is in strong shape. Of course, much of this depends on the availability of Depp, who's playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass right now and is supposed to make another Pirates Of The Caribbean movie either later this year or early next.