Like Alan Moore before them, writers Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis have created challenging and visionary comic books ripe for a Hollywood picking. Too bad Hollywood isn’t ready for them.

“I think the audience is ready for wilder stuff,” the envelope-pushing Morrison (above) told Wired.com by phone. “But Hollywood is still mostly dealing in a conservative mindset, so I can’t imagine a Final Crisis film happening anytime within the next 100 years.”

Too bad. Morrison’s Final Crisis is a metafictional, metaphysical apocalypse that takes Superman, Batman and other superheroes you already know — and many more that you don’t — across the reaches of time and space, fiction and reality. It’s ambition defined, which makes it a Hollywood pipe dream, for now.

Instead, we’re left with Morrison’s much safer All-Star Superman , slated to become the first animated feature based on his prolific work. The recently released debut trailer (below) bore little resemblance to the poignant interstellar psychedelia of Morrison’s award-winning comic, probably because it was written by Dwayne MacDuffie ( Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths ) instead of Morrison.

“I wasn’t upset, because I saw the movie and it’s one of my top three superhero movies ever,” said Morrison. “Only the superfans are going to complain, because the film has about 90 percent of my stuff in it. Much of it is actual dialogue taken from the book.”

That said, Morrison was never invited to apply his significant writing talent to All-Star Superman ‘s big-screen leap. “I wasn’t asked,” he said.





Going Red , Seeing Green

The equally demanding and rewarding Warren Ellis is similarly poised to make Hollywood waves at arm’s length. Ellis’ grim spy-fi shooter Red arrives onscreen Friday, packed with a star-studded cast — Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman to start — that reads like an Oscar rap sheet. But the Red film adaptation was written by two scribes — Jon and Erich Hoeber — who have crime films like Montana and Whiteout under their belts, and not much else.

Right now, getting lost in translation is not a problem.

“The film is very different” from his comic book, Ellis admitted on his always entertaining official site. “Not least because it needed to generate more material than the book itself actually constituted…. There are essentially only four characters.”

Things could get complicated if Hollywood decides to tackle Ellis’ more worthy comics, like the taboo-shattering Transmetropolitan , which drags the scathing gonzo journalist composite Spider Jerusalem through a dystopian future overloaded on synthetic pleasures, political sellouts, rampant propaganda and civilization in decline.

Years ago, Star Trek Shakespearean Patrick Stewart was reportedly interested in taking Transmetropolitan through the lens. But there are some challenges that even Jean-Luc Picard can’t conquer.

“It’ll never happen,” Ellis said in 2008. And it hasn’t. Which, as with Morrison’s apocalyptic Final Crisis or subversive psychedelic masterpiece The Invisibles , is also too bad. Because both Ellis and Morrison have troves of previous material that is worthy of ambitious Hollywood adaptation, weirdness and all.

We3 Be (Not) Making a Movie

Tentative advances in this direction are already under way, but closure remains elusive. Film versions of challenging Morrison comics — like the animal borg thriller We3 and the diabetic dream-noir Joe the Barbarian — are moving along slowly, with Morrison scripting only the former. And while he’s also writing the indie psych-western Sinatoro , only All-Star Superman is looking like a Red -ish blockbuster.

“ We3 seems to be the furthest along, and could make a great film,” said director Patrick Meaney, whose documentary Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods — the first to explore the comics brainiac’s fertile imagination — arrives Oct. 26 on DVD. “Supposedly, Grant’s screenplay adaptation is one of the best unproduced screenplays kicking around Hollywood.”

But even We3 isn’t kicking hard enough to break down the doors to conservative Hollywood’s panic rooms.

“ We3 is just stalled, as usual,” said Morrison. “People just keep asking, ‘What the tone? What’s the tone?’ Which is a shame. But I’ve got other stuff coming up that could change everything, and make people look again at those films. But you know how Hollywood is: There’s a bunch of irons in the fire, and we’re all waiting for some of them to catch.”

The time for them to catch is now. Why not? The money has spoken, said Morrison.

“Entertainment has changed again,” he explained. “We’ve been concerned with realism for a while, but we’re getting back into psychedelia and fantasy again. Look at James Cameron’s Avatar or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland . Both happened to catch a wave that few were ready for.”

You can throw in Christopher Nolan’s successful cerebral sci-fi blockbuster Inception , and even his accomplished run on Batman’s film reboots. They have all taught us that there’s room in Hollywood for smart but sensational speculative films that simultaneously push and entertain audiences. The sharp but unorthodox minds of Ellis and Morrison fit in perfectly with that type of alternative ambition.

Alan Moore vs. Hollywood

When discussing comic book movies, the still-unsettled case of Alan Moore vs. Hollywood is instructive. As Morrison and Ellis’ unorthodox predecessor, Moore created some of the most enduring comics titles of all time — and complained loudly as they were turned into mostly underwhelming films that had a tough time living up to the mastery of their graphic predecessors. The divorce has been messy as hell ever since.

“I don’t even have a copy of Watchmen in the house anymore,” Moore told Wired.com in July, ahead of the perennial Hollywood blitzkrieg known as Comic-Con International. “I’m pretty much out of comics now. I really want nothing to do with it.”

One hopes that this kind of fate doesn’t await Ellis and Morrison, who have entered the transition to cinema later in the evolution of comic book movies. When studios originally wanted to make a film out of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons‘ foundational 1986 graphic novel Watchmen , Hollywood had yet to fully understand that comics weren’t just storyboards, but creative universes unto themselves, to be faithfully rendered and appreciated.

Special effects still comparatively sucked when it came to translating comics’ infinite possibilities to screen back then. More than 20 years of cultural and technological evolution later, director Zack Snyder finally made a mostly faithful Watchmen film that raked in $185 million worldwide.

Morrison and Ellis are now entering a Hollywood better versed on the importance of comics integrity and fandom. But it won’t be until Hollywood takes on Ellis’ and Morrison’s more complex sci-fi work like Planetary or Final Crisis , respectively, that we’ll be able to tell whether the acclaimed writers are renewable film resources. Or, like Moore, comics champs beaten down by Hollywood’s hunger for disposable stories.

Grant Morrison image courtesy Patrick Meaney

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