Just when we thought we were nearing the end of Hollywood’s vampire craze, with the Twilight saga drawing to a close and fewer undead projects in development, Warner Bros. dives back in to the blood-red waters for the potential adaptation of a graphic novel (no pun intended).
The studio grabbed the rights to Tomm Coker and Daniel Freedman’s Undying Love, an eight-part mini-series that Image Comics released earlier this year. Their story blends elements of traditional vampire lore with the bloody vengeance of the Hong Kong action genre, centering on a protagonist who must defeat countless enemies to win the heart of the woman he loves. The hero, if you can call him that, is John Sargent, a former U.S. soldier who falls for Mei, a vampire. Now in order to be with her, Sargent must eliminate the vampire who originally sired Mei … a bloodsucker who just happens to be one of the most powerful vampires in history.
In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Coker said their influences at the time of writing were Tony Scott’s True Romance and the gritty musical biopic Sid and Nancy, and they claimed the Twilight films “only served to reinforced the type of bloodsucker we wanted to get away from.”
Now we just have to hope they ask the same of the films Warner intends on producing. THR says Coker and Freedman will write the script for the feature film adaptation, which is encouraging, but most of the key decisions will come down to who they hire as a director and which actors he or she will recruit to play the doomed lovers. That will go a long way to determining if this is a fresh vampire series we can Love.
