People love Netflix, people love comic book movies and people sure as hell love Keanu Reeves, so combining the three to create a multimedia universe based on the beloved star’s graphic novel BRZRKR is a surefire recipe for success.
Just weeks after the first issue hit shelves, it was announced that the streaming service had acquired the rights to the property and placed both live-action and animated features into development, with Reeves playing the title hero in both projects.
The plan is for the live-action effort to come first, and it’s just taken a huge step forward after hiring a writer. In a new interview with Collider, Reeves revealed that Project Power and The Batman scribe Mattson Tomlin is on board to pen BRZRKR.
“We’re working with Netflix who have been very cool. They’re going to let us do an R-rated story which is cool. My ambition or hope is not to do a filmed version of the comic book so that they’ll have things in common, definitely the main character and his kind of rule set, but that we can take it to other places as well. We’re talking to a couple of different animation companies and trying to figure that out. And, again, for me I’m hoping to be inspired and influenced.
There are some rules to the story, but I also want other creators to do their version of it. So I’m hoping to do a different version of a metaverse where in the sense having different storytellers with one set of rules but go other places with it. We’re working on trying to set up a company with the animation and we’ve hired a writer for the film Mattson Tomlin. He’s been cool and just starting to put things together. That’s where we’re at.”
The broad strokes of the plot follow an immortal warrior through 80,000 years of bloody battles. Half mortal and half god, the mysterious figure referred to only as ‘B’ offers his services to the government so he can fight wars too violent, deadly and dangerous for anybody else, in exchange for information surrounding his cursed existence and a means to end it.
In all honesty, that sounds awesome. Keanu Reeves as an ass-kicking demigod who can’t die is about as sound a basis for a franchise as you could hope for, and it follows Netflix’s recent precedent for building out franchises across multiple avenues as we’ve seen from The Witcher and Army of the Dead.
