Arrow and Trollhunters executive producer Marc Guggenheim is in the process of adapting Too Dead To Die, the graphic novel he created with artist Howard Chaykin, into a feature film for Universal Pictures. Guggenheim has been talking about the process for a while on his Legal Dispatch newsletter, but TheWrap got some official details, in terms of who besides Guggenheim is involved with bringing the super-spy story to life. As the title might suggest, Too Dead to Die is more than a bit inspired by James Bond, but it’s a distinctly American take.
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The story centers on Simon Cross, a retired super-spy who is thrust back into the fray when he learns that he not only has a daughter, but that she has been targeted for assassination. The story raises some questions about the super-spy archetype, and interrogates some ideas about what, exactly, all those wonderful toys were being put to use in service of.
“I like to describe Cross as a super-spy who is as close to James Bond as I could get without being sued. He’s basically America’s answer to James Bond: Like Bond, he likes women and the finer things in life, but being American, he’s more coarse. He’s less proper. He has a tendency to break the rules. I don’t think he takes orders as well as Bond does,” Guggenheim explained to Dynamic Forces last year. “I’m using the present tense here, but the truth is that that’s all in the past for Cross. When we meet him, he’s in his seventies and long since retired from the field. He has a collection of medications that have been prescribed to manage all the conditions decades of hard living have left him with. His liver is a mess. His back is in shambles. He has STDs. He’s basically falling apart when we meet him.”
Guggenheim has been working on the screenplay for a while, having just turned in a new draft last week (per Legal Dispatch). He has been talking about the film adaptation since the graphic novel was released in December 2022, so it seems likely Universal actually optioned it before it was even published, and he was developing the two in tandem.
Per TheWrap, Kelly McCormick and David Leitch and Guy Danella of 87North will produce under their first-look deal at Universal. Executive Vice President of Production Matt Reilly will oversee the project for Universal.
Here’s the official synopsis for the graphic novel:
In the 1980s, Simon Cross enjoyed a life of international intrigue as the world’s greatest secret agent; today, he’s a retiree who splits his time between romancing widows and ruminating on whether the various missions he undertook as a younger man were as much about saving the world as they were maintaining a status quo favorable to those in positions of power. Enter Liberty Nuance, an old flame bearing life-altering news: their fiery fling three decades earlier resulted in the birth of a daughter, Lily, a brilliant geologist currently targeted for assassination by the mysterious leader of a multinational corporation. And so, plot thus set, Cross embarks upon an investigation that quickly escalates into a globe-spanning battle against a variety of sinister villains.
