‘PREACHER’ Movie Moving Forward, Director SAM MENDES On Board

Cover To PREACHER #1

Source: Hollywood Reporter, Borys Kit and Leslie Simmons

Columbia Pictures has picked up the rights to “Preacher,” the popular 1990s Vertigo series, for an adaptation to be directed by Sam Mendes.

Created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, “Preacher,” which ran from 1995-2000, told the story of a down-and-out Texas preacher possessed by Genesis, a supernatural entity conceived by the unnatural coupling of an angel and a demon. Given immense powers, the preacher teamed with an old girlfriend and a hard-drinking Irish vampire and set out on a journey across America to find God — who apparently had abandoned his duties in heaven — and hold him accountable for his negligence.

The project was previously set up as a one-hour series at HBO but was put into turnaround. Mark Steven Howard wrote a pilot which Howard Deutch was attached to direct.

Read more HERE.

From the Preacher wikipedia page:

The series consists of 75 issues in total — 66 regular, monthly issues, five one-shot specials and a four-issue Saint of Killers limited series. The entire run has been collected in nine trade paperback editions. The final monthly issue, number 66, was published in July 2000.

The HBO series would’ve been a great way to go but MARK STEVEN HOWARD wanted to do an episode per issue which raised a ton of red flags for me. PREACHER is one of the coolest comic series’ of its kind but you can read an issue in five minutes. There is no way you can stretch those books into an hour and keep it real. The show would have been best served as a 2-3 year 10 episode a season series. Somewhere in that ballpark.

So here we are on the flip side with the task of making a roughly 25 hour story into 2. Gonna be tough. There was a handful of pretty cool encounters that should be featured in any retelling of the story, most notabley; the opening story arc, the trip to France, the sideshow in New Orleans, the desert shootout, and the finale, not to mention some of the flashback/backstory sequences. I could be forgetting a chapter in there somewhere. The last time I read the series must have been around the time the series ended.

Oh and one more thing. LANCE HENRICKSEN as THE SAINT OF KILLERS please? The role was written with CLINT EASTWOOD in mind but Clint’s pretty busy these days. I’ve always liked HENRICKSEN, particularly in the MILLENNIUM series.

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