To paraphrase Stephen King (badly) in The Dark Tower, it's time for people to enjoy a bit of a stew with their storytelling. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story this morning that Platinum Studios will team up with Columbia Pictures for a story with a couple of different flavors mixed together. The title tells it all: Cowboys & Aliens.
Set in the 19th Century, the story covers the adventure when cowboys and Indians get caught up in an alien invasion. You played that when you were kids, right? Maybe it was just us.
Floating around tinseltown since 1997, the property is the brainchild of Platinum Studios Chairman Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Now part of the studios' Macroverse, their shared universe of over 1,000 characters, Cowboys & Aliens was initially pitched on the heels of Rosenberg's success shepherding Men In Black from comic to film.
"I've always felt that Cowboys & Aliens would make a great movie, so it's really exciting that it's moving forward," said Rosenberg.
The project is now in the hands of Escape Artists, a production company within Sony, after three years at Dreamworks. "This type of material is why the word 'tentpole' was invented," commented Jason Blumenthal, the producer at Escape Artists responsible for bringing the title to Sony.
Screenwriters Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Donnelly will be adapting the property to film, at the same time that Platinum Studios preps the comic book, written by Fred Van Lente and drawn by Ian Richardson. The screenwriters have also written Dead of Night, another project from Platinum's Macroverse, currently set up at Dimension Films.
If Platinum Studios sounds familiar to Fanboy Planet readers,
it's because they recently
optioned our pal Myatt Murphy's Two Over Ten
for a film project called Unleashed.
Below is some concept art for Cowboys & Aliens
that Rosenberg is letting us run. Click on the thumbnails
below for the full-sized art. Not even The Hollywood Reporter
got this…
