Y: The Last Man has had a lot of time to make it from the comics pages to the big or small screen, and now that The Walking Dead, another long-running, popular-outside-the-average-comic-reader post apocalyptic title has shown its staying power, one wonders why Y: The Last Man hasn’t been put into production before.
If you ask me, it’s probably because studios have balked at the idea of a cast made up almost entirely of women. But according to Vulture, New Line Cinema is stepping up to the plate.
I’d always envisioned Y: The Last Man as a television series that would by necessity employ every actress working in the business at some point, but New Line is thinking a bit bigger. From Vulture:
We hear that the studio is very pleased with a draft from former Jericho writers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia, and has already begun the process of meeting with director candidates to hire for the project.
Vulture even goes as far as saying that Y: The Last Man is one of New Line’s top priorities.
For the uninitiated, Y follows the story of a young man named Yorick and his helper-monkey-in-training Ampersand, somehow the only living male mammals on Earth after the sudden and instantaneous death of the rest. While on a micro scale the comic series is about the mystery of Yorick and Ampersand’s survival, Yorick’s quest to get to his girlfriend in Australia, and the women who help, hinder, study, and try to get him to take the more responsible path, on the macro level it plays out the fascinating results of a gendered culling of the human race. Commercial airliners fall out of the sky. The only surviving elected American senators and representatives are Democrats. The Israeli armed forces are suddenly one of the strongest in the world. Three astronauts, one female, two male, orbit the globe in terrible isolation until they run out of food and fuel, the space program that supported them devastated.
If the project goes ahead, it’ll be interesting to see how New Line frames the long and twisting narrative, and how many of the human details of survival and loss remain after it is condensed to movie length.
(via The Beat.)
