Monsters can be a fine metaphor for real life problems – Joss Whedon used them to great effect in Buffy – and Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura’s graphic novel I Kill Giants **pulls off a similar effort. It’s being adapted into a film with Zoe Saldana and Madison Wolfe attached to star.
Wolfe will be Barbara Thorson, a girl struggling with life’s problems who escapes into a fantasy world of magic and creatures. Kelly, who has adapted the screenplay himself, describes it thusly: "It's a story about a girl who’s a bit of an outsider – she's funny, but totally in our geekland: she's obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, she doesn't have a lot of friends, she’s a bit of a social misfit. She's taken her fantasy life a little far, and really only talks about giants to people. She's convinced that giants are real and giants are coming, and it's her responsibility to stop them when they show up. This weird little fantasy life that she's going has started seeping into her real life, and as we see things from her point of view, we see that she sees pixies and she sees signs in the clouds and other things that might be telling her that bad things might be coming."
Saldana is playing school psychologist Mrs. Mollé, who helps Barbara deal with her demons and bonds with her at the same time. Anders Walter is directing starting early next year, with Chris Columbus (no stranger to stories of life issues and weird creatures himself) acting as a producer.
Saldana has recently shot Nina Simone biopic Nina and is currently on the bridge of the Enterprise as Uhura for Star Trek Beyond. Wolfe was seen in True Detective’s first season, and will be seen in both David O. Russell’s Joy (out January 1) and Jay Roach’s Trumbo, which follows on January 22.