Hey! Look! We want to rip off Frank Miller!

There’s a movie based on a Warren Ellis property coming out this fall and it’s going to be starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and others.

I’ve already done enough to annoy Warren Ellis – believe me when I say, this I know. But I always think of it as something akin to a gnat and an elephant with me cast in the role of the gnat. Ellis has a portfolio of work and it’s a pretty respectable portfolio at that but writer’s like baseball players don’t hit one out of the park every time they’re up at bat.

Red (the comic mini series) isn’t bad either, when I was casting about looking for material for this post I was forced to revisit the material. While I remember picking it up (all of it), and I remember enjoying it, I don’t think it was one of Ellis’ best pieces but, that’s my opinion. One thing I will say though is the strength of it is in the dialog and that much I could see and remember in just looking at the material. Ellis’ dialog for the lead is solid I only hope some of that leaks into the film.

That being said though, Ellis had been leaking the posters for the forthcoming film based on the mini via his blog. Now, he posted a bunch of teasers and truthfully the first thing that came to mind was Frank Miller. Whether that was intentional or not and looking back at the covers to the mini, the design doesn’t diverge greatly from what was done but, Miller has done a bunch of flicks with this very strong visual language that’s carried over to the marketing materials (I’m thinking of Sin City and 300) and unfortunately Red now appears as if it is trodding familiar ground. My first response to it was eeewwww.

Now, that’s the final poster above and I like it a lot more than the teasers. Since I’m not a big movie guy anymore (Netflix and broadband have changed that) I wouldn’t say my opinion counts for much and really I don’t think I’m the target audience for a film like this anyway (18-34 male demographic). It’s packed with stars although I would’ve probably liked to see Malkovich in the lead over Willis, even though Malkovich isn’t an actor who is a big box office pull, he has the chops in a way to be a badass that Willis’ simply doesn’t.

But hey, I’m the gnat anyway – this is probably one more instance where I’m doing my level best to piss someone off so let’s hope for Ellis’ sake it makes huge scads of cash and makes him a millionaire multiple times over. I’m wary but I will say this – if you ever get the chance to see the Global Frequency pilot that was quashed (and they are doing another shot at bringing Global Frequency to the small screen) Ellis’ stuff does translate well so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was wrong.