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Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi Still Circling Brubaker's Sleeper

by Alex Billington
June 22, 2009
Source: MTV

A few of you might remember hearing about this project. It made headlines when we wrote about how Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise would be working together on an adaptation of Ed Brubaker's Sleeper comic book series. Since that story hit in August of last year, we haven't heard anything since, not a word about it, even in all the excessive Tom Cruise updates. So is the project dead in the water? Not exactly. MTV talked with author Ed Brubaker and got a few interesting updates and other funny quotes. "I talked to one of the producers a couple of weeks ago, and they have a new screenwriter that they hired," Brubaker told MTV.

While he couldn't remember the name of the new screenwriter (woops!), Brubaker did mention, "You know Hollywood, though, they usually go through a million screenwriters on one project." Good point. According to Brubaker, Sleeper is still "in the outlining stage" but he claims Raimi and Cruise are still attached. It was announced by the trades last year that Sam Raimi was producing (separate from his horror label Ghost House Pictures) and that Tom Cruise was interested. But as we all know, Cruise later took on a handful of other projects (which didn't include Sleeper). Brubaker doesn't expect we'll see this anytime soon.

Apparently the success of Star Trek may have even delayed Sleeper because it was similar to their story.

"If you remember in Sleeper, there's a 'suitcase black hole' in the story," explained Brubaker. "That was going to be part of the master plan of the bad guy in the Sleeper movie, and then Star Trek came out and it had this miniature black hole, and they're like, 'Now we can't use a suitcase black hole,' and it went back for a rewrite."

Sleeper is actually a spin-off series from another comic called WildC.A.T.s. The story centers on an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery. "It was one of my lowest-selling books, so you'd think that every copy that sold had ended up in Hollywood somewhere," joked Brubaker. I haven't read the comics, but it sounds like they've got a good story worthy of being adapted. Only time will tell if it ever does get made.

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