Word came earlier this month that the feature film adaptation of Rob Liefeld‘s Prophet has nabbed a major addition to its creative team with Arrow creator Marc Guggenheim being tapped to pen the screenplay. Prophet has been in development at Studio 8 since last year but the involvement of the architect of The CW’s Arrow-verse has Liefeld himself excited. The pair have opened up in the days since about the project (including who Liefeld would like to see as the character) but in a new interview Guggenheim has teased the direction of his script which sounds like it will be very faithful to the original version of the hero.
“Interestingly enough, in the comics and in my adaptation, he was created by the Nazis,” Guggenheim revealed in a new interview with Collider. “My goal with the movie is to place him in a position where he has to face very similar, almost parallel moral questions. I’m a big fan of stories that place the hero on the horns of an ethical and moral dilemma. Having come out of great evil, to then have to go and face a new form of that evil, is very interesting to me. I’m being vague because I don’t wanna get too specific about my take.”
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Guggenheim also teased the many questions he’s asked himself while working on the film, like what sub-genre of superhero movie he thinks the film could find itself in and what makes the character special and different enough that he needs his own movie. In addition, though a full blown cinematic universe wasn’t confirmed, Guggenheim said that they’ve had discussions about just that. They’re not committing to one just yet though, sticking to the Marvel Studios model of “make one good movie at a time.”
“They made Iron Man,. And then, they made another good movie, and another good movie after that,” Guggenheim added. “So, while I’d be lying, if I said that we never discussed the possibility of a larger cinematic universe, I’m a firm believer that you don’t truly talk about that stuff, until you have the bones of just a very good, independent, standalone film.”
A Prophet solo film can take place over several of the lifetimes the character has lived, from WWII to the acclaimed distant future stories. From their the possibilities are endless in how it can connect to other Image Comics properties, from Youngblood to (by some miracle) pieces of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn universe. By that token it would be possible for Guggenheim to do for Image Comics films what he did using Arrow as the focal point for an entire DC TV Universe.
