It has been more than a year and half since word first broke that Bill Willingham’s hit Vertigo Comics series Fables was being developed as a feature film. Comic Book Resources, however, has managed to score an intriguing update that seems to suggest that a big screen visit to Fabletown is still very much in order. The outlet reports (via Empire) that Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) is currently working on a draft with A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel still attached to helm.
“[Arcel] did a draft, and now he’s supervising Jane, who’s doing a draft,” says producer David Heyman. “Hoping that it’ll come in and we’ll be able to move to the next stage. All these things always take longer than you want. And ‘Fables’ is not easy, by any means, but I think it’ll be pretty great.”
Fables imagines that all the characters from the world’s most beloved storybooks are real – real, and living among us, with all of their powers intact. From Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf, to Goldilocks and Little Boy Blue, these beloved characters are alive and well – but they’ve been exiled from the land of fairy tales. Escaping the mysterious Adversary, they have relocated to a magically-camouflaged New York City neighborhood known as Fabletown. To survive in the mundane world, the Fables will have to fight for their happily ever after.
“I’m drawn to stories about outsiders,” Heyman says about his fondness for the property, “and I think the Fables are outsiders. They’re people torn from the place where they were raised, by The Adversary. They arrive in a New York City-type place, and how we’re approaching is that they’re people who are all separate, and how they ultimately have to form the community in order to survive. They’re all inhabiting their own little universes within this world. But they have to form this community, and that really appealed to me. And I just think the characters are so vivid. And I also think the farm is, again, it’s very human. That’s what I like. It’s a challenging film.”
Jeremy Slater (The Lazarus Effect, The Fantastic Four) was also formerly attached to Fables as a writer, although it’s currently unknown how much of his script is still being utilized.
Goldman’s next film as a screenwriter, Kingsman: The Secret Service, re-teams her with director Matthew Vaughn and is set to hit theaters domestically February 13. After that, she’s set to work with Tim Burton on Peregrine’s Home for Peculiars, set to hit theaters on March 4, 2016.
