Deadline reports that Jeff Smith’s RASL is being developed by SHERLOCK HOLMES producer Lionel Wigram. The series, the follow-up to Smith’s million-selling fantasy BONE, concerns an art thief who jump to different universes to steal priceless works of art, but at a great personal cost.
Wigram, who just wrapped Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, said he was tipped to the comic by colleague Peter Eskelsen and bought it with his own cash. “We’ll team with a writer and figure out how to adapt it to the screen and hopefully it will become a big movie franchise for Warner Bros.,” he said. ICM brokered the deal. Wigram will produce, and Eskelsen and Jeff Smith will be exec producers.
A BONE film has been in development for a long time, with an aborted musical version at Nickelodeon, and now another animated film in the works with Dan Lin (who was also a producer on SHERLOCK HOLMES) at WB. When RASL first came out a couple of years ago we noted that it was ripe for feature development; it’s high time someone decided we were right!
Wigram is famous for putting together a graphic-novel style treatment of the Robert Downey/Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movie, illustrated by John Watkiss that wasn’t really a graphic novel but subliminally suggested to money men that it was.
