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New Line Cinema Making 'Y: The Last Man' a High Priority Project

by Ben Pearson
September 10, 2012
Source: Vulture

It often takes filmmakers years to get their projects made, but it's unusual for every single step of the development process to be widely reported and parsed over. But that's exactly what's happened over the past nine years (!) with an adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn's fantastic graphic novel Y: The Last Man. We've covered the project since D.J. Caruso was involved, through script troubles, potential star Shia LaBeouf dropping out, director Louis Leterrier's involvement, and finally some new writers being brought on earlier this year. Vulture reports the project is now considered a high priority at New Line. More below!

I'm a big fan of Vaughn's graphic novel, and I think D.J. Caruso's proposed trilogy with LaBeouf would have been pretty great had it gotten through development. But now that we know that particular iteration won't ever happen, I'm starting to think that this source material is better suited for a TV show. For those who aren't familiar, the basic premise of the story is that an escape artist named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only members of the male species to survive a plague that wipes out all the men on Earth. That's the basic gist of it, but it's one of the best things (books, comics, anything) that I've ever read, so I'd highly recommend checking it out for yourselves because there's a lot more to it than that.

Vulture's report says that the suits at New Line are happy with Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia's new take on the script, and they're currently meeting with directors to tackle the project. As cool as it would be to see Yorick on the big screen, I think something like a limited run on HBO or AMC would be able to actually do this story justice, considering it would be tough to fit all of the events into a trilogy, let alone a single movie as this one is being reported.

Y: The Last Man is one of the most beloved comics of this generation (right up there with the practically unfilmable Preacher), so seeing it adapted into some alternate form of media is practically a certainty at this point, but I just wish the studio would give it the room it needs to breathe (maybe like the proposed Dark Tower method, with limited run TV shows in between films) and really capture all of the nuance of Vaughn's story. We'll see how this one shakes out, but as you guys know, anything that's been in development this long is going to have a tough road to production, so we'll see if it actually gets the official greenlight.

Filed under Development, Movie News

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