Rob Liefeld Praises Prophet Script From Marc Guggenheim

The Prophet movie is still a ways off — after all, it’s not like they have been secretly filming an unfinished screenplay during the pandemic shutdown — but so far, creator Rob Liefeld is excited about the conversations he’s having, and the pages he’s seeing come in from Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim. News that the pair were collaborating on the project came earlier in the pandemic, and in May, both Guggenheim and Liefeld commented on the excitement they had for the project — and not much more, since it was in its infancy and they have been doing this long enough not to spill too many beans.

Now, Liefeld says that he has more of a sense for the project, and it’s just making him more sure they’re doing it right. He thinks that Guggenheim has a firm handle on the world that he (Liefeld) created, but is adding enough of his own touches to make it something unexpected.

“Prophet is in great shape, we have Marc Guggenheim writing the screenplay,” Liefeld told Collider. “There were a number of writers vying for the job to write the screenplay, and I knew when I met with Marc that he was the guy. Studio 8 was really excited to fit into his schedule — he’s very in demand — and we had a couple conversations, and I’m like, ‘Wow, Marc really gets it, he’s the right guy, I’m honored that he’s even interested.’ He expressed that he was a fan back in the day. I’ve known Marc for about a decade; I was a fan of his comic books that he was writing prior to him taking over The CW’s Arrow show….He had a great, very, very, I cannot tell you how true and reflective of the comic book what he’s doing [is], but he’s [also] bringing a fresh, Guggenheim kind of couple new little twists in there that are great. So that’s onboard. If that first draft is great, I guess we’ll find a bubble to shoot it in.”

During an interview in support of his directorial debut, an episode of Legends of Tomorrow that aired just as news of Prophet and a long-in-gestation Jackpot movie broke, we asked Guggenheim whether he was interested in moving over to features. Not yet.

“I think I’m pretty far away from being able to direct a big budget feature film,” Guggenheim, who has had a hand in writing movies like Green Lantern and Percy Jackson, told ComicBook.com. “That said, I am very, very interested and really quite frankly, desperate, to direct another episode of television, and one day I would love to direct something that I’ve written. I wrote a spec pilot during the quarantine that is designed to be produced in a post-pandemic world, with all the limitations that we know are going to be involved. I could definitely see myself directing that.”

The comic centers on John Prophet, a homeless man in the ’40s, who volunteered to be experimented on by Dr. Horatio Wells, a time-traveling scientist from the future who used DNA-enhancing methods to transform Prophet into a super-soldier. Originally engineered for evil, Wells had a change of heart and reset Prophet, but after being placed into stasis for decades and awakened by Youngblood, he mistook them as enemies, leading to him becoming the team’s antagonist in his first appearance.

More details on this as they become available. What do you think about the possibility of a Prophet movie from Liefeld and Guggenheim? Sound off in the comments.