Ah, genre mash-ups. The better ones are usually in novels or comic books, where such things are easier to pull off, but with the continued flood of movies crafted from the pages of any title going, it was only a matter of time before they began creeping on to our screens. Disney is hoping they’re a success as the studio has bought up rights to Cowboy Ninja Viking, with Zombieland** pair Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese lined up to adapt the script.
Created by AJ Lieberman and illustrator Riley Rossmo for Image Comics, Cowboy Ninja Viking tells the story of Dr Sebastian Ghislain, a psychotherapist tasked with recruiting those who suffer from Multiple Personality Disorders and working with them to create specialised counter-intelligence agents known as Triplets. But when some of them get out of control and start killing people, the deadliest of them all, Cowboy Ninja Viking, has to take them down.
The eponymous Triplet has entire conversations between his three personalities, creating a sort of Marx brothers-meets-Deadpool feeling. So it seems appropriate that Reese and Wernick should get the gig, given how funny their dialogue was on Zombieland and the fact that since that movie they’ve scored work on the Deadpool film.
Of course, it’s extremely high concept and we’re not quite sure whether the badass nature of the comic character is an easy fit for Disney, but at least they’re trying something different. There’s no word on a director or cast yet (they sort of need a script for that), but if next year’s batch of comic book characters perform at the box office, expect this one to speed into full development.