Sacrilegious and Hollywood go hand in hand (read my article on Sacrilegious movies) and it’s not stopping any time soon. In fact, Hollywood is taking on what is considered to be a Sacrilegious horrorfest. PREACHER is a graphic novel series from Vertigo which ran from 1995 – 2000, created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon and I looked up Wikipedia and o man, the plot is pretty blasphemous, so if you’re quite sensitive, you might not wanna read this part…
it’s about Jesse Custer, a down-and-out preacher in the small Texas town of Annville. Custer was accidentally possessed by the supernatural creature named Genesis in an incident which killed his entire congregation and flattened his church.
Custer, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, goes on a journey across the United States attempting to (literally) find God, who abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was born, to hold him accountable for negligence. He also begins to discover the truth about his new powers, which allow him to command the obedience of those who hear his words. He is joined by his old girlfriend Tulip O’Hare, as well as a hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.
During the course of their journeys, the three encounter enemies and obstacles both sacred and profane, including: the Saint of Killers, an invincible, quick-drawing, perfect-aiming, come-lately Angel of Death answering only to the authority of God Himself; a serial-killer called the ‘Reaver-Cleaver’; The Grail, a secret organization controlling the governments of the world and protecting the bloodline of Jesus;
According to Hollywood Reporter, Columbia Pictures has bought the rights to this popular comic book series and will have Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) to direct the movie adaptation. No writer has been hired to do the script yet.
Apparently at one point, HBO wanted to make a series based on this, the lame director Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil, Ghost Rider) wrote the pilot but the project never took off.
And a previous movie version was actually produced by Kevin Smith’s View Askew with James Marsden attached to star as the lead character but alas, that didn’t happen either.
Hopefully, third time’s the charm. Once again, I’m a open-minded liberal, so this kinda thing makes me curious even more, as long as it doesn’t end up similar to Keanu Reeves’ Constantine.
