Stan Lee’s ‘The Last Resort’ Headed To The Big Screen

China’s Tianying Media has struck a deal with Stan Lee’s Pow! Entertainment to bring Lee’s [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

China's Tianying Media has struck a deal with Stan Lee's Pow! Entertainment to bring Lee's 1970s comic strip The Virtue of Vera Valiant to the big screen, Deadline reports.

The Chinese company purchased The Last Resort, a script penned by Lee and Bob Underwood about a woman who inherits a resort hotel — in space.

Lee and Underwood will executive produce alongside Sheri Rosenberg Kelton and Randy Mendelsohn, as well as producers Elliot Tong and Reinhard Schreiner.

Tong and Schreiner, founders of LA-based Roaring China, brought the project to Tianying who are now looking to go into production later this year. Roaring China aims to bring "A-list Hollywood talent to the Chinese market," and Tianying is now in talks with top Chinese comedy directors to steer the movie.

"Stan Lee is a true legend of our time. We are so excited to be working with Pow! Entertainment and to be able to bring the amazing script of The Last Resort to life," said Tianying Media CEO Wu Jian. "We are focusing on the Chinese market, a rapidly-growing audience that is extremely hungry for new ideas and a variety of different films."

Added Tong, "We want to keep this momentum going with more acquisitions. This is a great feat for Tianying Media and Chinese production as a whole."

A paperback for the little-known comic strip says of Vera Valiant: "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll love every minute with this courageous, confused, and crazy new cartoon soap opera family."

The soap opera spoof was scripted by the Spider-Man and Avengers co-creator and illustrated by Frank Springer, a comic book and comic strip artist who worked on Marvel comics Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain Marvel, and Dazzler.

Springer, who drew for satiric magazine National Lampoon and co-created dark-comedy mature comic The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, among the first of its kind, gave Vera it's straight-faced art while Lee gave the "over the top soap opera strip" its campy melodrama.

According to The Fabulous Fifties, the comic strip emerged as a spoof of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, itself a daily soap opera satire produced by Norman Lear (All in the Family).

The now 95-year-old Lee has had a bumpy last few months: in late 2017, Lee fell victim to fraud, and by April reports surfaced the Marvel Comics legend was being subjected to elder abuse. Lee later personally denied those claims in a video and threatened to sue in response to the "slander."

That same month, a former business associate of Lee's allegedly stole the comic book creator's blood — which was then used to sign Black Panther comic books boasting a "hand-stamped signature of Stan Lee using Stan Lee's Solvent DNA Ink."

Lee most recently made a cameo appearance in Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War, now the highest-grossing superhero movie of all time, and is expected to next appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp, in theaters July 6.

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