Somewhere out there within the underbelly of Tinsel Town lies a pilot script for Quantum & Woody, a television series based on the Valiant Comics characters bearing the same names. It’s a script to a series the Russo Brothers still hope to sell someday. First announced as a project in 2017, the project was soon said to have a home at TBS, and the WarnerMedia-owned network was said to have hopes of turning it into a franchise. Now, Joe Russo himself tells ComicBook.com TBS and USA have both passed on the property, but the duo isn’t feeling completely discouraged.
“It’s been a while,” Russo says of a barren landscape surrounding the Valiant-based series. “You know that project was set up at USA for a while and unfortunately it didn’t end up going there.”
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That’s when the filmmaker — who co-directed Avengers: Endgame alongside his brother Anthony — reiterated they’re still trying to get someone to pick it up, and the hope remains someone will make a deal for it at some point.
“At the moment, I think it’s just something we’re sitting on and waiting for the right opportunity to see where we can, you know find the current partner for that,” the director adds. “Really is a lot of what you do in the business is you know waiting for the right partner to line up with the right material.”
As Russo says, it took the brothers and their production house a decade to get Extraction made, a movie that quickly went on to become one of Netflix’s most-watched original features.
When the Quantum & Woody series was first announced, trades reported Community star Joel McHale was in talks to play one of the leads. At the time, McHale joked with ComicBook.com that he often begged the Russos to make him the MCU’s Spider-Man.
“Yeah, I’ve asked them to be Spider-Man like six times, and they keep telling me I can maybe play Spider-Man’s grandpa,” joked McHale.”We probably text once a month, maybe twice a month, and they are possibly the busiest people on the planet. There may be something there in the future, and I would also love to work with Scott Derrickson, who directed Doctor Strange, who has been a friend of mine since the early 2000s. With the end of the ‘hit’ The Great Indoors on CBS, I’ll hopefully develop something soon, which I can’t tell you about because it isn’t real yet.”
We spoke with the Russos in support of Netflix’s Mosul, due out from the streamer this Thursday.
Cover photo by Gabe Ginsberg/WireImage
