Earlier this year, it was announced that writer Kurt Busiek’s “Astro City” would become a feature film by way of Working Title Films. Busiek’s story about an American city populated by superheroes and villains will come to theaters courtesy of a screen treatment from Busiek himself — not to mention a little bit of help from the Coen Brothers.
“[Working Title] actually saw it because the Coen Brothers sent it to them,” Busiek told Newsarama in an interview. “They read it and said, ‘This is big and sprawling and enormous, and we don’t know what the road in is, but it all comes out of character. We get that. We understand these characters.’ And that was where we started working together on it.”
“They’ve optioned the rights and they’ve hired me to do the screen treatment,” he added. “We’ll see what goes on from there.”
Busiek explained that certain aspects of Astro City will change for the big screen, just by necessity of the adaptation process.
“The outline that I’ve turned in has changes,” he said. “It’s clearly not exactly what’s in the comics, but it’s very much the spirit of what’s in the comics. It’s the characters that are in the comics. And it feels very, very much like an ‘Astro City’ story. Things may change along the way, but right now, the changes are the sort of changes you have to make for an adaptation if you’re telling a character’s story in two hours instead of 10 issues.”
“But I know how to write an ‘Astro City’ story,” he continued. “So if I have to change a character’s origin, or if I have to put somebody in a different job than we saw them in in the comic, it’s in the service of telling that story.”
Source: Splash Page