Sam Raimi takes Wyatt Earp back to the future

"Jonah Hex" may not have succeeded in launching the high-concept western as a viable movie genre, but Hollywood is still taking another couple of shots at it. "Iron Man" auteur Jon Favreau is currently directing Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in the comic book-based "Cowboys & Aliens," due out next summer. And according to The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision Blog, Sam Raimi is attached to "Earp: Saints for Sinners," based on the Radical graphic novel. 

Mandeville Films partners David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman are producing the movie for DreamWorks. Matt Cirulnick will script the project, on which Radical president Barry Levine and Josh Donen, Raimi’s partner at Star Road Entertainment, also are producers.

The film, and graphic novel it's based on, reimagines real-life western figure Wyatt Earp pitted against outlaws in a ravaged future society where the only boomtown left is Las Vegas. "Mad Max" with a six-shooter ...?

For decades a fixture on the silver screen and TV, Wyatt Earp was an actual lawman in the old west, best remembered for the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, an event that serves as the climax of most of the movie versions. Heavily fictionalized versions of the character have been played  by Randolph Scott in "Frontier Marshal" (1939), Henry Fonda in John Ford's classic 1946 "My Darling Clementine," Burt Lancaster in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (1957), James Garner in "Hour of the Gun" (1967), Kurt Russell in 1993's "Tombstone," directed by George Pan Cosmatos, and by Kevin Costner in Lawrence Kasdan's 1994 "Wyatt Earp." Hugh O'Brian played the part on a long-running TV show in the fifties and sixties.

The comic was created by Cirulnick and Mandeville exec David Manpearl. M. Zachary Sherman wrote it with Cirulnick, with illustrations by Mack Chater and Martin Montiel. Radical plans on unveiling the project Thursday during its Comic-Con panel.

Raimi is still expected to helm Disney's "The Wizard of Oz" prequel, "Oz, the Great and Powerful," before filming "Earp: Saints for Sinners."