Dan Harris, the co-writer of Bryan Singer’s X-Men 2 and Superman Returns, is turning his hand to videogames.
The annoying precocious writer (he’s just 29, and was 23 when X2 was released, not that anyone’s impressed, grumble mumble grumble) has signed on to adapt Dante’s Inferno, an upcoming EA game, for Universal.
The game will finally realise Dante Aligheri’s dream of seeing The Divine Comedy, his wonderfully nightmarish epic poem about the various levels of hell, first written in the 14th century, become a multi-media event across several platforms.
Or not, as the case may be. Although the game does revolve around a hero making a hellish journey through the various circles of Beelzebub’s backyard, it didn’t have an official title until recently. In fact, when Universal won a four-studio bidding war for the property back in the autumn, it wasn’t titled at all.
Harris, of course, wrote X2 and Superman Returns – both of which combined excellent action sequences with nicely-drawn character work – with his old partner, Michael Dougherty. He appears to be going it alone this time, but we’ve got a feeling that Universal might just have found a writer who has the chops to achieve what Empire previously thought impossible, and write a videogame-based movie that’s not entirely effing useless.