King Zombie will ride in Deadworld

The voice of Solid Snake, David Hayter has joined with Pandemonium's Bill Mechanic to turn the comicbook Deadworld into a zombie feature franchise according to Variety. I mentioned this back in February when Mechanic mentioned it during the Coraline premiere.

Hayter (X-Men, Watchmen) will write the screenplay based on Gary Reed's comic (although it was originally created by Stuart Kerr and Ralph Griffith).

I've never read Deadworld, but I do like the sound of its take on the zombie mythos.

It starts four months after a zombie apocalypse has decimated the Earth. Humans few and far between. The main difference is the fact that the attacking dead are as sentient and intelligent as the living. One of the main characters is King Zombie, a Harley-riding corpse who holds a grudge against the survivors who made him an outcast (this also reminds me of the comic, Chopper Zombie).

The plan is to begin production next year.

Mechanic, who ran Fox when Hayter wrote the first "X-Men" film, saw the scribe as ideal to lay out what he hoped could be a multipic story arc. The offer fit in perfectly with Dark Hero, which Hayter and Benedict Carver formed as a way to put Hayter's creative stamp on numerous films, TV and Internet properties in the sci-fi and horror genres. Aside from writing the script, Hayter will conceive and design the look of the film.

"It's very much about the design of the Deadworld and creating cool, frightening but not necessarily gory creatures," Hayter said. "I am a huge fan of zombie mythology."

If this is done right it could give the zombie genre a much needed infusion of new brains.

Have you read the comic? Will it work as a feature film? Who could play King Zombie?

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The Random - The Losers, Deadworld, Tron 2

Jeremy Renner, who stars in The Hurt Locker, The Assassination of Jesse James, and 28 Weeks Later, told ComingSoon today at the New York Comic Con that The Losers is one of the projects that he's looking at joining soon. He didn't say which character he's interested in, but said that it's a "very interesting anti-hero graphic novel, I love that sort of thing." The comic, first published in the 1970's and again in 2002 by Vertigo, follows a highly trained and eclectic Special Ops team that is set up, betrayed and left for dead. They then go on a quest to find who sold them out and why, righting wrongs they encounter along the way.

At this week’s red carpet for Coraline, producer Bill Mechanic revealed to MTV News that he’s already got another project in the works with ties to the comics world — an adaptation of the comic book series Deadworld. Deadworld was originally published back in 1987 by Arrow Comics but was recently re-launched by Image in 2005. The storyline features survivors fighting off an apocalypse of zombies, but with the twist that the attacking dead are as sentient and intelligent as the living.

According to Radical Studios publisher Barry Levine (via io9), the full Tron 2.0 trailer is going to get its world premiere at this year's San Diego Comic-Con.

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