Anna Daniels
In the 1990s, Deadpool comics creator Rob Liefeld created a character named John Prophet who appeared in Youngbloods before spinning off into a title of his own. Former Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8 is developing a Prophet movie centering on that character, a supersoldier who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up years in the future, and now the film has found a writer. Marc Guggenheim, who developed The CW’s Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, will be tackling the screenplay.
Liefeld, an iconic stylist who practically became the face of comics in the 1990s, essentially created Prophet as an extreme anti-version of Captain America. John Prophet is a ruthless DNA-enhanced supersoldier from World War II era who’s put on ice for decades, Demolition Man-style. But when he wakes up in the future, he realizes he woke up years before he was supposed to, so he has no defined mission and must regain his humanity in an unfamiliar world.
Liefeld’s original run on the series suffered from the same drawbacks as many comics of that era. Action over substance seemed to be the name of the game back then, and that’s what sold. But Prophet was rebooted as a more experimental comic a few years ago, and that’s when things got really interesting. The new version feels more like an experimental story, with limited dialogue, wild visuals, and huge, swing-for-the-fences ideas that seems like the type of bold storytelling that no studio would try to replicate in movie form. (A small taste of the revamped version: the story takes place 10,000 years in the future, where Prophet visits a formerly-living alien spaceship and joins a caravan where aliens eat the waste of the creatures in front of them. I dare Hollywood to try to depict that.)
This adaptation has been in the works since 2018, and Liefeld explained back then that the movie version would begin with Prophet‘s 1990s origins without leaning on any specific storyline for inspiration. So it sounds like Guggenheim – whose credits also include Eli Stone, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, and the Green Lantern movie that was lampooned in Deadpool, will have some freedom to put his own spin on things. Naturally, this movie is meant to kickstart a franchise, so maybe they’ll get to the reboot plotlines in eventual sequels. Deadline first reported the news about Guggenheim’s involvement.
Adrian Askarieh (Hitman: Agent 47), Brooklyn Weaver (Run All Night), and Rob Liefeld are producing, but there’s no director on board yet and no word about when production might begin.
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