The latest development in the ongoing saga to bring Red Sonja back to the screen is that Transparent creator Jill Soloway will now be writing and directing the next cinematic adventure of the comic book heroine who was introduced by Marvel Comics in the ’70s. The news was reported by Deadline earlier today.
There was some controversy when it was announced that X-Men director Bryan Singer, who had been accused of numerous allegations over the past few years, was announced as the director of the Red Sonja movie. Wisely, Millennium Films realized how bad it would be to keep Singer on the project, and he was removed.
The last film version of Red Sonja was the 1985 movie starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which itself was a spin-off Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian movie. Over the past few years, Dynamite has been publishing Red Sonja’s comic book adventures, but there’s no word on whether those comics will play a factor in Soloway’s film.
The non-binary Soloway has made huge inroads into television with their Emmy-winning Amazon show Transparent with Soloway winning an Emmy for her direction. Sadly, the show was also brought down during the #MeToo movement with allegations made against the show’s Emmy-winning disgraced star Jeffrey Tambor. Soloway previously wrote and directed the independent film Afternoon Delight and was the directing collective for the movie Valencia the same year. Solloway was previously a writer and exec. producer of United States of Tara and I Love Dick. Since Transparent, Soloway has been developing a project called College.
Soloway is bringing their production partner Andrea Sperling and company Topple Productions onto the project as well.
A large sword-and-sandals epic would be a pretty big leap forward for the television pioneer, and it will be interesting to see who they end up casting to play Red Sonja.
Feel free to let us know what you think of this development in the comments.
Maybe she’ll do a great job but this is like hiring Uwe Boll to write and direct a remake of “Eat, Pray, Love.”
Mike
I have no hope for this. I’d be more wary of Bryan Singer’s commitment to a film as to the main fact that he left/fired/limbo the last TWO movies he was doing for others to finish with only weeks to be done filming. What the hell is up with that? You start it, you finish it. We still don’t have a story of what happened on Bohemian.
The story about what happened on Bohemian Rhapsody has been well chronicled.
The real question is: Why does the world need a Red Sonja movie? I won’t pay to see it, regardless of who directs.
Judging by the number of comics Dynamite is putting out a month with Red Sonya on it, I’d say she certainly has a significant fanbase. And given that a lot of the creators on the titles tend to be women, it’s not like the old TnA days of the character. Women are big fans of the character.
And not for nothing, but if Gail Simone seriously throws her weight behind this, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. She’s a Top 10 comic book writer in terms of popularity, she tweets a random hashtag and it trends nationally, and she’s a huge part of the character’s resurgence.
Still depends on it being a good movie and getting the character right, but there are far crazier things in production.
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