Tag Archives: Radical Publishing

Brett Ratner’s Hercules is the Peoples Champion?

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Turns out that Dwayne Johnson, The Peoples Champion, the Rock is in talks with MGM about starring in Hercules. The film which is to be directed by Brett Ratner; who directed the comedians version of the Expendables. I believe it was called Tower Heist.

The film is based on the Hercules comic book by Radical Publishing. They have two series which are called, “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” and “Hercules: The Knives of Kush.” The last one just makes me think there are blades made of marijuana. Both series are written by Steve More with artist Cris Bolsin.

The Thracian Wars is described as follows:

“Fourteen-hundred years ago, a tormented soul walked the Earth that was neither man nor god. Hercules, powerful son of the god king Zeus, received nothing but suffering his entire life. After twelve arduous labors and the loss of his family, this dark, world-weary soul turned his back on the gods, finding his only solace in bloody battle. Over the years he warmed to the company of six similar souls, their only bond being their love of fighting and the presence of death. These men and woman never question where, why, or whom they go to fight; only how much they will be paid. Knowing this, the King of Thrace has hired these mercenaries to train his men to become the greatest army of all time. Hercules begins to question King Cotys’ motives when he takes his army out to battle and sees them practice on innocent men, women, and children of their neighbors. Deep in his soul something stirs, but is it enough to stop a mad king and his army of the damned from marching across Greece – or even Olympus itself?!”

So if I’m to understand this correctly, Hercules roamed the earth in seventh century as an emo, laying the smack down for Kings while the Thracians were being wiped out by Goths. It’s okay, I’ll suspend my belief on this because I too have watched Marvel’s Thor film adaptation. I can’t believe I paid to see that either though.

This might be MGM’s bid to find their own Conan movie for reinvention, but I’m skeptical about Ratner more than I am about The Rock; sure it puts the movie at risk for being associated with the Scorpion King, but “you keep what you kill” and man did that movie die horribly.

So what’s wrong with Ratner? He’s done a great job directing Red Dragon and an X-Men movie, but he’s also been the force behind the Rush Hour movies. While the Radical Comics Hercules title does look serious, it’s still a comic. The comedic moments makes me wonder if if any Rush Hour will leak a bit into the film.  Maybe it’ll just have to take a really good script to really tell.

Hey, is it my imagination or does Hercules on these covers look a little like a time lost Judge Dredd?

Oblivion on the Horizons for Morgan Freeman

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Freeman will join the cast that includes Tom Cruise as the lead role of Jak, Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko in this Universal release.  This film was conceptualized by and to be directed by Tron: Legacy User, Joseph Kosinski.

With the rise of movies adapted from popular teen novels and comic books, the crafty director has gone one step further and is creating a comic book to be released before his movie. The comic book which is called Oblivion will be released sometime in 2012 by Radical Comics, to be co-written by Kosinski and Arvid Nelson, creator of Rex Mundi. A preview of the graphic novel was released at the end of 2010 Comic-Con with some rather snazzy concept art.

So this will be Radical Publishing’s first venture beyond comic books. The comic will be done in a format that features 40 fully painted landscape images that will accompany the prose. So more like a Winnie-The-Pooh old school children format, rather than frame by frame comic book style that we’ve come to expect. I believe that this is how the movie 300 started as a comic book. Ow, my mind just got a visual of Pooh wearing a Spartan costume. So bad!

Kosinski film adaptation of this unreleased comic was originally turned down by Disney, telling him that they will not produce this film and essentially told to shop around some more with other studios and producers. Oblivion was later picked up by Universal Pictures.

It’s unclear what role Freeman will play in this apocalyptic science fiction love story (Is there any other kind of love story?) but even if it’s the disembodied narrator’s voice, it’ll still be cool. “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

The official description of the story on Radical Publishing website:

“futuristic science fiction love story that takes place in an apocalyptic future where most of the population lives in clouds above an earth surface that has been rendered for the most part uninhabitable. An earthbound soldier — stuck there repairing drones that patrol and blast a savage alien life form — encounters a beautiful woman who crashed in a craft, and they have an experience that forces him to question his world view.”

Reading the many variations of this description online, this is what I’ve cobbled together and predict the story will go.

Jak, the main character of the story, is a war-weary repairman with a military background. His sole function is to repair and maintain robots that fight for the User; cue Daft Punk playing in the background. These drones act like terminators on an alien species, who are referred to as scavengers. The scavengers stalk the ruins what appears to be a polluted and destroyed Earth, doing what they can to survive. While somewhere beyond the clouds is the human race, living on a low orbiting spaceship and being all overlord like.

Jak then discovers a spaceship with a hot actress inside. With her help, he slowly pieces together that the planet is either not Earth or a planet filled with savage aliens, but an alien civilization filled with vengeful aliens that humans have nearly wiped out; because they want the resources or to colonize.

Freeman will play the philosopher like leader of the space humans and attempt to stop Jak from reprogramming all the drones from stopping the badness.

For the M. NightShamWow ending, the crashed spacecraft is really a burrowing vehicle where other humans; the poor; live far underground in Zion, while the rich aristocracy live in the clouds.