Spider-Man 2 and Smallville's Miles Millar and Alfred Gough have lined up another comic-book property to adapt for the big screen, and this time it's Nick Spencer and Ronald Salas' Existence 2.0, a violent and bound-to-be-controversial body-swap action story.
Our hero / antihero is self-absorbed, totally amoral physicist Sylvester Baladine, killed in the opening frames by a hitman named Marko. Luckily for him, it so happens that he's just perfected a consciousness-swapping devide (for some jihadists who he nevertheless plans to double-cross) and swaps into Marko's body as his own lies dying. He then sets about living it up as a hitman, until the same people who ordered his hit go after his young daughter. At which point even this guy decides to maybe get involved.
Think Wanted rather than Superman, in other words. You can get a taste of the first issue, published last summer, at the link above.
Gough and Millar are working with Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes on this, which marks something of a new direction for Dunes. After all, this isn't a horror and hasn't been made as a film before. Let's just hope they keep the bombast just the right side of crass, eh, because while the action in this one will be extreme, it's all too possible for it to slip into mere offensiveness-for-the-sake-of-it.