He teased the movie version fans will never get a chance to see, saying that he hoped to “[bring] to the BIG screen what we’ve been getting in TV so readily now — great characters, RELATIONSHIPS, world building and genre re-combination. … I was excited to make an ADVENTURE movie, with swashbuckle, that was fun and funny but had something to say.”

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The movie would have adapted the first 10 issues of the 60-issue series, he went on to say. “We wanted to tell a complete story … but not the whole story,” he explained, adding that he hoped that “in success, we could get tell the rest of our serialized adventure.” Cinematic inspirations for Trachtenberg’s take on the movie included Raiders of the Lost Ark, Midnight Run and a couple of surprising additions: “Willow and Ladyhawke I may have referenced a little too often,” he joked.

A movie based on the DC Entertainment/Vertigo series about a world in which the males of every species had become extinct with the exception of one man and his monkey had been in the works since 2007, when director D.J. Caruso was attached and Shia LeBeouf rumored to play the lead role of Yorick Brown. In later years, writers Stephen Scaia and Matthew Federman were brought in to create a new script.

The rights reversion is hardly unexpected; back in January of this year, Vaughan himself said that he expected it to happen if the movie didn’t start production “in a few months.” The writer, who has worked on ABC’s Lost and developed CBS’ Under the Dome, is currently focusing on comics work again, with Image Comics’ Saga and the digital series The Private Eye.

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