Like a dedicated doctor applying the defibrillator paddles to a flat-lining patient one more time, New Line is refusing to give up on Brian Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s beloved comic series Y: The Last Man. The company’s latest move is a drastic one: ditching the previous script drafts and hiring writers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia to start fresh.
In case you forgot, the story focuses on Yorick, an amateur escape artist who has become the lone male human survivor after a mysterious plague killed off everyone else with a Y chromosome - and even all male animals. Except, that is, for his pet capuchin, Ampersand. Now living in a world entirely filled with women, Yorick heads out on a mission to discover why the tragedy befell the world and to look for his girlfriend Beth, who had been in Australia.
Y has been wandering the halls of development hell for a few years now. The rights were nabbed back in 2007, with Disturbia director DJ Caruso and writer Carl Ellsworth teaming up to adapt it with Shia LaBeouf loosely attached to star. But the sprawling story proved tough to squeeze into script form and even after touting that they wanted to make a trilogy, the trio eventually tossed in the towel.
In 2010, rumours began to surface that Clash Of The Titans** director Louis Leterrier was sniffing around the project, but nothing came of it.
Now New Line is without a director or likely star, but has figured that the writers of Sony’s Zorro origin story might be the men to make it work. The pair has no produced film credits to their name just yet, but they’ve been working steadily on US TV, including shows such as Human Target (yay!) Charlie’s Angels (boo!), Warehouse 13 (moderate yay!) and Jericho (cancelled too soon, we think!) And let’s face it: given the way most big movies develop and the particular history of this one, they’re probably just two more in a line of writers if and when this thing gets to our screens. Still, talk about brilliant source material...