Months after Marc Guggenheim departed the project as writer, Rob Liefeld’s Prophet movie has lost star and executive producer Jake Gyllenhaal. That comes straight from Liefeld, who shared the news to social media, suggesting that the split is amicable, and that he wishes Gyllenhaal well with his upcoming release of the Road House remake for Amazon’s MGM Studios. The project has been in development for four years, with bullish early development deteriorating somewhat after a round of rewrites. At first, it sounded like Liefeld and Gyllenhaal liked what Guggenheim was doing, and it seemed like the movie was cruising along. Once Guggenheim’s script was set to be rewritten, updates became fewer and farther between.
Prophet was first eyed as a feature film in 2015, then Liefeld’s Extreme characters were set to have their own shared universe around 2017. That never materialized, and instead Liefeld started talking about this new iteration of Prophet in 2020. Deadpool was already a big hit by then, and Guggenheim had become a selling point for Hollywood producers.
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“Folks ask me about the Prophet film and while the movie is still moving forward, I can confirm it is no longer with Jake Gyllenhaal’s involvement,” Liefeld tweeted. “Wishing him all the best with Roadhouse and his future projects.”
Gyllenhaal is no stranger to comic book roles; he played Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home and his name was even an Easter egg in the background of 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats.
John Prophet, originally an adversary in the Liefeld-created Youngblood, was something of a “what if Captain America, but violent?” story. While Peacemaker has an element of that, there’s not likely to be a ton of overlap between the two projects. In the comics, Prophet was a homeless man in the ’40s, who ended up being part of a government-funded super-soldier program. It worked, but the process also made him mentally unstable, and the science of the time could not keep his volatility and rage under control.
Where Captain America went into a de facto cryostasis after seemingly dying during a World War II mission, Prophet was put into stasis by his creator, springing back to “life” almost fifty years later and becoming an antihero.
Originally inspired by Gene Roddenberry and Steven Spielberg, Prophet had a brush with the big screen in the ’90s, when TriStar Pictures optioned the rights. They let it lapse, though, and it wasn’t until 2018 that Studio 8 optioned the property and began developing it in earnest.
