Now all the geek sites are going to want to cover the Revolutionary Road junket. See, that Sam Mendes’ next movie, and he’s just been announced as the director for the film version of Preacher. Everybody gonna want their Preacher scoop!
Columbia has picked up the rights to the excellent maxi-series, which is about a preacher who has the Word of God in him (he can make you do anything he tells you to do), his hit man girlfriend and his vampire best friend as they search for the Lord, who has vacated his seat in Heaven and abandoned his Creation. It’s pretty hardcore, occasionally blasphemous stuff. Oh, and the ghost of John Wayne is an occasional guest star.
The good news, I guess, is that Preacher is moving forward in a major way. The previous movie version had a budget of like 25 million, while this will surely be a major motion picture with lots of money thrown at it. It was also previously a potential HBO show.
The bad news is that Preacher is moving forward in a major way. I just don’t see a movie version doing justice to the sprawling narrative that Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon created. Sure, it’s adaptable, either as a single film or a series, but I fail to see the point. This is a point I’m willing (and hope) to cede in the future as more news about this project comes to light.
The worst news is that Preacher is moving forward with Sam Mendes in charge. First off, I don’t much like Mendes’ films – they’re second tier Oscar bait, glossy and forgettable. Preacher is like a David Allan Coe song writ large, and I don’t think Mendes has the vulgarity to properly adapt a work that features a man who fucks a woman made out of meat products.
That said, I do like the idea of a Brit handling the film. Preacher is, at it’s heart, an outsider’s fantasy version of the US, and having a non-American direct makes sense. But I’d rather it be someone like Matthew Vaughn who, even with Kick-Ass in production, is still looking at more comic book projects. He has the grit and vulgarity to make this work.
Of course maybe Mendes has been just waiting to unleash his inner degenerate. We’ll be following this one closely.