Columbia Pictures has picked up the rights to Mitch Rouse and Christopher Nelson’s spec script, Supermax, and you can see why – for it has one of the coolest premises we’ve heard for a while.
Set in a prison for the supernatural, Supermax will be a combination of weird buddy flick and balls-out Carpenter-esque action horror as a gifted prison guard, assigned to the maximum security wing of a prison specifically built to house supernatural beings, is forced to team up with the prison’s most monstrous inmate and fight his way out after a riot breaks out.
Coooooooool. In fact, let’s add an extra couple of o’s in there: cooooooooooool.
First things first – this is not to be confused with the currently-in-development (hell) over-at-Warners superhero movie, Super Max, in which the Green Arrow is wrongly imprisoned in a maximum security prison for superheroes, and then has to fight his way out. After all, the two movies only share a title and, erm, fairly similar premises. We’re sure, though, that Supermax and Super Max, should they ever see the light of day, won’t be superpeas in a maxpod.
Rouse and Nelson – both actors-turned-writers (the films you can see them in fully justify their decision to head for the Final Drafts) – spoke to Fangoria recently about the movie, which will be produced by Todd Garner, and for which they banked somewhere in the region of mid-six-figures, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“We wanted to write a movie with everything we like about the genre in it,” Nelson told Fangoria. “Something we would want to see. And we wanted to have fun with a big concept we knew would work.”
For more from that interview, click here. And apologies to Bloody Disgusting, who broke the news on this, umm, over two weeks ago, although it's only just been confirmed in the trades. We missed it back then – but dammit, we’re not missing it now, and Supermax sounds just barmy enough to become a film we’ll keep a close eye on.