Alan Moore's The Show To Be Distributed in North America by Shout!

Alan Moore's film The Show is coming to North America courtesy of Shout! Studios. The studio announced today, via Variety, that it will carry the mystery fantasy movie from the writer of celebrated comic including Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The film stars Tom Burke (Mank, War & Peace) with Siobhan Hewlett (Sherlock, Canterbury Tales), Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals, Tony and Susan), Sheila Atim (Girl From the North Country, The Underground Railroad), Christopher Fairbank (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Fifth Element) and Moore. The Show debuted at the Sitges Film Festival in October 2020.

The Show continues from a series of short films Moore penned titled Show Pieces. It is his first original screenplay. Mitch Jenkins directed the feature film.

According to The Show's synopsis, "A frighteningly focussed man of many talents, passports and identities arrives at England's broken heart, a haunted midlands town that has collapsed to a black hole of dreams, only to find that this new territory is as at least as strange and dangerous as he is. Attempting to locate a certain person and a certain artefact for his insistent client, he finds himself sinking in a quicksand twilight world of dead Lotharios, comatose sleeping beauties, Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, unlikely 1930s private eyes and violent chiaroscuro women…and this is Northampton when it's still awake. Once the town closes its eyes there is another world entirely going on beneath the twitching lids, a world of glittering and sinister delirium much worse than any social or economic devastation. Welcome to the British nightmare, with its gorgeous flesh, its tinsel and its luminous light-entertainment monsters; its hallucinatory austerity."

Shout's vice president of acquisitions, Jordan Fields, vice president of business affairs Steven Katz, and Protagonist's international sales manager Tom Chesover negotiated the deal. They have not yet confirmed a release date or strategy.

"It should come as no surprise that a film so darkly playful, so unsettling and so ferociously original springs from the mind of Alan Moore," Fields said. "Expertly realized by director Mitch Jenkins, a superb Tom Burke and a fully committed cast, The Show hits bullseye for a sophisticated audience eager to be delighted, beguiled and thrilled."

"Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins have created something totally original with The Show, a new world full of mysteries for audiences to discover and keep coming back to," said Chesover. "We were so excited by Shout! Factory's passion and creativity, and they are clearly the perfect partner to connect with fans in a longstanding and meaningful way."

Michael Elliott, Jim Mooney, and Tom Brown for EMU Films and Lex Films.