Warner Bros. is in negotiations to bring Hard Boiled, from 300 and Sin City creator Frank Miller with The Matrix and Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot artist Geoff Darrow, to the screen.
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Deadline reports that Free Fire‘s Ben Wheatley is no deck to write and direct the adaptation.
The film will be a co-production between Solipsist Films (who did Sin City) and Hollywood Gang (who did 300), produced by Stephen L’Heureux, Bernie Goldmann and Gianni Nunnari.
This isn’t the first time Hard Boiled has been bandied about for adaptation, and even Deadline couldn’t get Warner Bros. to confirm the negotiations, so it could end up much ado about nothing — but Wheatley’s film is expected to make him a name, and as we saw with Preacher, these things that go in and out of development forever generally eventually get made.
Hard Boiled debuted in 1990. Here’s how Deadline describes it which, presumably, gets at the heart of the bits Hollywood is interested in: “[The story] centers on insurance investigator Carl Seltz, who learns that he’s really a homicidal cyborg tax collector codenamed Nixon. A fellow robot informs him that he’s the last hope for their race to escape their programmed slavery.”
Other directors attached to the film were David Fincher (with Nicolas Cage expected to star), Miller himself, and Mukunda Michael Dewil. There was also a video game made for PlayStation in the late ’90s.
The three-issue miniseries came from Dark Horse Comics (who have also worked with both Miller and Darrow numerous times over the years), and is available in collected edition.
