Forrest Gump and Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis is reportedly set to direct a feature film adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here. The film, which is set to reteam Zemeckis with Gump star Tom Hanks, does not yet have a distributors, but there are reportedly several studios and streaming services eyeing it, according to Deadline. Eric Roth, who adapted Forrest Gump for the screen, will do the same with Here. While Forrest Gump followed Hanks’s titular character across decades of American history, Here will center on a single room, and the people who inhabit it over the course of decades.
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The idea for Here started as a six-page story that ran in Raw in 1989. In 2010, Pantheon announced that a full-length graphic novel based on the concept would be released, and the book saw print in 2014.
Here’s how Deadline describes the project: “Here is centered in one room and focuses on the many people who inhabit it over years and years, from the past to the distant future. I’m hearing that it will be a big-ticket film with a lot of heart.”
Here‘s critical reputation has long been assured; in 2006, acclaimed cartoonist Chris Ware wrote an essay on it in Comic Art #8, marking the first time since 1989 that the original short was reprinted in full. It seems plausible that the attention garnered by the Ware piece helped contribute to the longer-form revival the book got after, since Ware’s Acme Novelty Library and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth were huge hits in the early 2000s, and his work was attracting the attention of critics and academics outside of comics.
The film will be produced by Playtone and ImageMovers, with the sale being handled by CAA and WME, the agencies that represent Hanks, Playtone, and Zemeckis.
Zemeckis, Hanks, and Roth each won Academy Awards for Forrest Gump, which ultimately took home 6 Academy Awards and was nominated for 13. It was the second consecutive Best Actor win for Hanks, who had taken home the trophy for Philadelphia the previous year. He has been nominated four other times.
Hanks previously starred in the graphic novel adaptation Road to Perdition, alongside Hollywood legend Paul Newman. In that film, a very young actor named Tyler Hoechlin played Hanks’s son. Hoechlin would go on to appear in Teen Wolf before nabbing the role of Superman on Supergirl, which carried over to the Elseworlds and Crisis on Infinite Earths crossovers before Hoechlin got his own full-time Arrowverse gig on Superman & Lois.
