FiLM Grenade

In what seems like the 100th shot at adapting the graphic novel Preacher to film or TV, Variety has announced that director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road To Perdition) is now attached. Variety puts it like so:

Sam Mendes will direct a bigscreen adaptation of the supernatural graphic novel “Preacher” for Columbia Pictures.

Created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, graphic novel focuses on the preacher of a Texas town, who is struggling to get by and is driven only by his strong moral sense. When the city is decimated by an otherworldly force, he embarks on a journey across the country to take on the evil.

Hmmm, now I have read all 75 issues of Preacher and adapting this to film is not going to be easy. A few months back they were going to go with an HBO series which probably would have been the best idea. Hopefully they are planning a series of films to really get the scope of the story, by the way “the evil” they mention in the Variety piece is actually God that main character Jesse Custer is after. If they stay true to the source material this one isn’t gonna be short on controversey, they better not puss out. Did I mention he has a vampire sidekick? That is only scratching the surface of this epic story. What say you, people?