DC’s ‘Fables’ Moving to Big Screen With ‘Fantastic Four’ Writer and ‘A Royal Affair’

[Lencho01]

http://www.slashfilm.com/dcs-fables...stic-four-writer-and-a-royal-affair-director/

DC’s ‘Fables’ Moving to Big Screen With ‘Fantastic Four’ Writer and ‘A Royal Affair’ Director

Posted on Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 by Russ Fischer

Given the surge of Hollywood interest in fairy tale stories, I’m surprised that it has taken this long for Bill Willingham‘s award-winning DC/Vertigo series Fables to get a huge movie deal. In fact, however, Fables has been tied up in stalled deals for years; one of them was a TV deal that saw Fables back-burnered when the intended network, ABC, went with another fairy-tale revival instead. (That would be Once Upon a Time.)

But now Fables is back in play from David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford of Heyday Films, which did a little series called Harry Potter. Jeremy Slater, who wrote the Fantastic Four reboot, is scripting, and Nikolaj Arcel, who directed Mads Mikkelsen in A Royal Affair, will direct.

THR reports the deal. Fables features characters from fairy tales and folklore, who call themselves Fables, and who have set up in a NYC neighborhood after being forced out of their homeland. (There’s also an upstate NY location for Fables who don’t look human.)

The story works with just about every character you could care to imagine from folklore, but more important is that the story gets very big. Willingham has scripted all of the 100+ issues in the still-ongoing series, and has toyed with various genres throughout the run. Across the span of the story, however, he built up a massive overall conflict between the Fables and their Adversary, who pushed them out of the homeland.

So there are many options for the movie adaptation; this film could create a franchise-ready story, or it could simply distill the essence of Fables into one go-for-broke effort. We’ll see which one the producers, Slater, and Arcel choose. Regardless, the various people working together on this one suggest that we should expect something that aims to tackle the full scope of the comic series.

 

[The Guard]

Huzzah!

 

[Rorschach2012]

As much as I want this to happen, it bums me out that this may come out before Flash or Wonder Woman.

 

[Crockett]

This is very intriguing, when the deal of setting up as a tv series in ABC fell through I thought perhaps they could set it up on HBO, but it's interesting they'll be going in the movie route (still would love if the could also do a series à la the S.H.I.E.L.D. show), well at least they're off to a good start with the director.

 

[Lencho01]

The Elements a Fables Movie Must Have, According to Mark Buckingham

 

[Guts]

Fables Lands Kick-Ass Screenwriter

 

[Keehar]

Kick Ass was great, so hooray to this.

 

[KevanG]

I love the series, the Telltale game was great and I'd love to see a movie about it. The characters are 99% public domain anyway so why not?

 

[The Guard]

Huzzah!

 

[Metal_Mario]

The characters are 99% public domain anyway so why not?

But not the versions of the characters that appear in "Fable". I'm sure those are copyrighted. (Just like Disney's versions of fairy tale characters are copyrighted.)