American Flagg! Being Developed as a TV Series

EuropaCorp has acquired the rights to Howard Chaykin's '80s cult hit American Flagg!, and plans to develop it as a television series from executive producer Luc Besson.

Besson, who is best known for movies like Leon the Professional and The Fifth Element, brought a graphic novel adaptation to theaters earlier this year in the form of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

American Flagg! centered on a dystopian near-future where the world's elite had been shuttled out into space, ruling Earth by remote while the remaining working class all toiled under a single, all-consuming corporation.

As is often the case with satire from the '80s, many of its core concepts have become a part of American daily life, from the elevation of corporate power in government to the militarization of the police force to the resurgence of Neo-Nazi and fascist groups in the American mainstream.

Deadline reports that Matthew Bankston, EuropaCorp's Vice President of Development, U.S. Television, is supervising American Flagg's development for television. Chaykin will serve as an executive producer on the series, along with Besson, Mark Wheeler and Rick Alexander.

As the original story describes it, "The saga's hero, Reuben Flagg, is a former TV star with a naive understanding of the American dream who is drafted into law enforcement in an utterly corrupt, shopping mall-like Chicago."

When TV veteran J. Michael Straczynski first launched his creator-owned comic book Rising Stars in 1999, the series featured a corporate superhero named Flagg. Chaykin, presumably concerned by the overlap in themes of corporate power, asked that the name be changed since he owned the trademark on Flagg. The character was renamed Patriot, and the gaffe was addressed in dialogue to the next Rising Stars issue.

Recently, Chaykin has been in headlines with his latest series, United States of Hysteria, which has featured racist, homophobic and transphobic imagery and language, drawing the ire of people on the left. Chaykin is primarily opposed to authoritarianism, though, and he has his share of critics on the right as well due in part to his vocal concerns about corporate power and U.S. President Donald Trump (whose rise he says is largely responsible for the comic's content). All of that is compounded by Chaykin's own oft-repeated claim that the book is meant to be controversial, and so any criticism it draws is playing into the satire.

EuropaCorp will reportedly be out with the property to screenwriters and directors soon.