A movie adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan‘s Y: The Last Man has been simmering for years, but unlike a lot of other more-than-half-a-decade long stints in pre-production purgatory, it’s one where we actually get interested instead of exhausted when we hear that the studio is still pushing people at the project. This is because while Y: The Last Man is the story of the last man on earth after a mysterious and instantaneous plague wipes out every male mammal on the planet except for him and his helper monkey in training, that necessarily means that it’ll be a movie with an enormous cast of female characters of all sorts.
Almost a year ago, New Line found a new set of screenwriters to take on the task of condensing the sixty issues of the comic into one movie, and the studio has just announced that they’ve chosen a director. It’s an unexpected pick, but one that I’m interested in seeing play out.
New Line has tapped Dan Trachtenberg, a director without a lot of credits to his name, and of those credits, the majority of them are commercials for companies like Lexus, Nike, and Coca-Cola. But there’s one more credit that’s worth talking about, and that’s Portal: No Escape.
No Escape is a, you guessed it, Portal fan film that kind of rocked the whole internet video community, and while it’s not my favorite Portal fan film (that’s the one where Chell bakes a cake), but the quality of the film is undeniable, and its handling of a female character (albeit a very small sample size) leaves me with zero complaints.
I don’t feel like any of this give me insight into how Trachtenberg’s Y will go, but it doesn’t give me anything to complain about either. Now let’s just get past the pre-production stage and get this thing moving!
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
