Comic Book Bites: AKA Jessica Jones, Powers and 300: Battle of Artemisia
NEXT year’s Avengers film is the culmination of Marvel’s current plans to bring its comic books to the live-action arena. And now television will add further breadth and depth to that world.
Among the several Marvel-derived small-screen projects are Guillermo del Toro’s Hulk, The Punisher, Cloak & Dagger and AKA Jessica Jones.
The last on that list is being scripted and executive-produced by Twilight screenwriter and Dexter producer Melissa Rosenberg, who has confirmed that the show will be part of the Marvel Universe.
“As we go along things will alter in terms of what is made available to us, but we’re definitely in that universe,” Rosenberg explained to HitFix. “We are in no way denying that that universe exists. And as much as I can, I’m going to pull everything in from there that I can use.”
She will have to take into account the legalities of Marvel characters in the hands of other studios (for instance, Fox has X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil, Sony has Spider-Man and Ghost Rider): “It’s very tricky navigation there. You can’t mention one guy because Fox has the rights to that guy and Universal has the rights to the other one.
“There are a lot of boundaries on who you can and can’t use,” Rosenberg admits. “I had Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and Carol Danvers [for the pilot script]. Basically, I wanted those three guys – then I would have a series. Everyone else we can be digging into lesser-known characters or taking known characters and renaming them.”
Even with the abortive attempt at a new Wonder Woman show, the scribe’s not worried, as she explains to MovieLine: “I think one of the major differences between Wonder Woman and Jessica Jones is that Wonder Woman is iconic and much better known, so you get into a lot of ridiculous expectations, like what’s her costume going to look like?
“Well, nobody knows who Jessica Jones is, except for fangirls and boys. So we have more freedom to actually bring the character to the screen in a way with a lot fewer expectations. The other side of that is we’ll have to earn fans as opposed to having them already in place.”
She added: “But I think there’s also another element; I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don’t find that as interesting as one who’s really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder. Her superpowers are kind of B-level, they’re not all that great. I just find that much more interesting, you know? It’s like she’s not quite cutting it in the superhero world, she’s a little too weird to be in the human world, so she ends up straddling both.”
Promising to keep the gritty nature of the books in previous interviews, Rosenberg was questioned about the very sexual nature of the heroine’s personal trauma with The Purple Man, the purple-skinned villain who defiled her: “She’s really suffering of the trauma of having been violated by this guy. So that plays a huge part of the plot of the first season, and probably in her series arc.”
So will her assailant still be purple-skinned on the small screen, asked io9: “I doubt it. It may become too cartoony for the tone of it,” says Rosenberg. “But who knows? I mean, we have to get in there, we have to get a greenlight for the script first and get in there and design it. But, you know, I’m open to interpretations of him. The tone of this is very gritty and very real, and I’m not sure if purple skin will do it. Maybe he’ll put on a purple suit.”
There’s still no production date for the pilot but it appears high on ABC’s list of new shows for next year. Meanwhile, Brian Michael Bendis’s other television-bound comic Powers has a pilot in the can but may have hit a snag.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, FX Productions has sent Powers back to the studio for reshoots. But fans should refrain from panic according to Bendis’s Twitter feed:
Other news from the social networking site told us that Joel Edgerton had passed on 300: Battle of Artemisia, director Noam Murro’s planned follow-up to Zack Snyder’s slow-mo spear-throw Spartan war flick.
Edgerton has also bowed out of Warner Bros’ beleaguered big-screen adaptation of 60s spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In August, George Clooney had quit because lingering back problems precluded him from doing the action scenes and since then Edgerton along with Bradley Cooper, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ryan Gosling, Alexander Skarsgard, Michael Fassbender, Joel Kinnaman and most recently Channing Tatum have all been mentioned as possibilities in an obvious struggle to get the film off the ground.
Director Steven Soderbergh finally stepped off this frustrating casting merry-go-round last week and headed for the exit doors, throwing the project into doubt.
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