Originally published January 21, 2015. Updated November 29, 2022.
An adaptation of Bill Willingham’s popular Fables comic book series has been in the works for quite some time now, but never really gained traction. Today, however, the film’s producer offered up an intriguing and encouraging update.
We learned back in June of 2013 that A Royal Affair helmer Nikolaj Arcel (who was once on the shortlist for Marvel’s Doctor Strange) would be bringing the DC/Vertigo comic to the big screen, and according to producer David Heyman (Gravity, Harry Potter), that’s still very much the case. On top of that, the movie now has a new screenwriter, in the form of Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class scribe Jane Goldman.
Heyman dropped the news in a recent interview with CBR:
“Jane Goldman is working on a draft as we speak. Nik Arcel is attached [to direct]. He did a draft, and now he’s supervising Jane, who’s doing a draft. Hoping that it’ll come in and we’ll be able to move to the next stage. All these things always take longer than you want. And Fables is not easy, by any means, but I think it’ll be pretty great.”
Heyman went on to talk a bit about what drew him to the story, and shed a bit of light on how the film will approach the ambitious source material, which tells the story of characters from fairy tales living in hiding in the real world:
“I’m drawn to stories about outsiders, and I think the Fables are outsiders. They’re people torn from the place where they were raised, by The Adversary. They arrive in a New York City-type place, and how we’re approaching is that they’re people who are all separate, and how they ultimately have to form the community in order to survive. They’re all inhabiting their own little universes within this world. But they have to form this community, and that really appealed to me. And I just think the characters are so vivid. And I also think the farm is, again, it’s very human. That’s what I like. It’s a challenging film.”
