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'Sgt. Rock' charges into the future
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“Sgt. Rock” has been in development for ages, but it seems to have taken one big step forward towards the big screen—all the way into the future. Producer Joel Silver has had the property for some twenty years, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and has been unable to get a movie made out of it.
Now Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend,” “Constantine”) is attached to direct the property as a science fiction movie. Chad St. John has been hired to write the screenplay.
A prototype of the Sgt. Rock character first appeared in “G.I. Combat” in the late fifties. The character’s rank was never mentioned. He was just called “The Rock.” He morphed into “Sgt. Rock” in “Our Army at War.” The character continued as sergeant of “Easy Company” through the rest of the fifties and sixties, weathering the anti-military backlash of the Vietnam War era which drastically reduced the popularity of war movies and comics. In the seventies the comic was finally renamed “Sgt. Rock” and continued to run for much of the Reagan era.
Until now, the various versions of “Sgt. Rock” have retained the comic book’s original World War II setting, with Silver and the studio trying to make a big-budget action adventure movie that was a throwback to flicks like “The Dirty Dozen.”
Apparently the World War II version has been popular with execs and talent, with high-profile screenwriters like Brian Helgeland, John Milius, Jeffrey Boam and Steven De Souza tackling the adaptation. Arnold Schwarzenegger was tabbed to play the part at one point.
Still, period war movies tend to be very expensive, and despite the success of “Inglourious Basterds” period war movies haven’t really been popular for years. Various attempts to copy the success of “Saving Private Ryan” tended to pale in comparison, only partly because they didn’t have scripts of that caliber, or Steven Spielberg, or Tom Hanks.
Warner Brothers thinks it’s solved the problem by moving the character into the future. (After all, science fiction action epics tend to be cheap…right?) Certainly the unexpected success of Paramount’s futuristic, military actioner “GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra” must have given the boardroom boys something to think about, though. Sony has recently announced plans to make a feature out of the board game “Risk,” prompted in part by the same apparent trend. “Underworld” and “Live Free or Die Hard” director Len Wiseman is known to be attached to two different futuristic military projects in development, “Atlantis Rising” and “Shrapnel.”
Guy Ritchie, director of Warner Brothers’ upcoming “Sherlock Holmes” movie with Robert Downey, Jr., was most recently attached to “Sgt. Rock.” He has moved on to work with Silver on DC Comics’ anti-hero pic “Lobo,” also in development at Warner Brothers.
No word at this point as to an actual storyline, how far into the future Lawrence and St. John intend to take the character or whether the entire film will take place in the future, or whether it would start in World War II and transport the character into future, a la Captain America or Buck Rogers, both of whom go into suspended animation to be reawakened later.
Casting has not been announced.
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